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The Good Doctor: A Novel (English Edition) por [Damon Galgut]

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Damon Galgut

The Good Doctor: A Novel (English Edition) eBook Kindle

Edição Inglês por Damon Galgut (Autor) Formato: eBook Kindle

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“A lovely, lethal, disturbing novel” of the dashed hopes of post-apartheid South Africa and the small betrayals that doom a friendship (The Guardian).

An extraordinary parable of the corruption of the flesh and spirit, The Good Doctor has inspired enthusiastic interest around the world and has assured Damon Galgut’s place as a major international talent.

When Laurence Waters arrives at his new post at a deserted rural hospital, staff physician Frank Eloff is instantly suspicious. Laurence is everything Frank is not—young, optimistic, and full of big ideas. The whole town is beset with new arrivals and the return of old faces. Frank reestablishes a liaison with a woman, one that will have unexpected consequences. A self-made dictator from apartheid days is rumored to be active in cross-border smuggling, and a group of soldiers has moved in to track him, led by a man from Frank’s own dark past. Laurence sees only possibilities—but in a world where the past is demanding restitution from the present, his ill-starred idealism cannot last.

“Galgut’s prose, its gentle rhythms and straightforward sentences edging toward revelation, is utterly seductive and suspenseful . . . Galgut is a master of psychological tension. . . . Tragic and brilliant.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

Descrição do produto

Trecho. © Reimpressão autorizada. Todos os direitos reservados

The first time I saw him I thought, he won’t last.

I was sitting in the office in the late afternoon and he appeared suddenly in the doorway, carrying a suitcase in one hand and wearing plain clothes – jeans and a brown shirt – with his white coat on top. He looked young and lost and a bit bewildered, but that wasn’t why I thought what I did. It was because of something else, something I could see in his face.

He said, ‘Hello…? Is this the hospital?’

His voice was unexpectedly deep for somebody so tall and thin.

‘Come in,’ I said. ‘Put down your bag.’

He came in, but he didn’t put down the bag. He held it close while he looked around at the pink walls, the empty chairs, the dusty desk in the corner, the frail plants wilting in their pots. I could see that he thought there’d been some kind of mistake. I felt sorry for him.

‘I’m Frank Eloff,’ I said.

‘I’m Laurence Waters.’

‘I know.’

‘You know...?’

He seemed amazed that we should be expecting him, though he’d been sending faxes for days already, announcing his arrival.

‘We’re sharing a room,’ I told him. ‘Let me take you over.’

The room was in a separate wing. We had to cross an open space of ground, close to the parking lot. When he came in he must have walked this way, but now he looked at the path through the long grass, the ragged trees overhead dropping their burden of leaves, as if he’d never seen them before.

We went down the long passage to the room. I’d lived and slept alone in here until today. Two beds, a cupboard, a small carpet, a print on one wall, a mirror, a green sofa, a low coffee table made of synthetic wood, a lamp. It was all basic standard issue. The few occupied rooms all looked the same, as in some featureless bleak hotel. The only trace of individuality was in the configuration of the furniture, but I’d never bothered to shift mine around till two days ago, when an extra bed had been brought in. I also hadn’t added anything. There was no personality in the ugly, austere furniture; against this neutral backdrop, even a piece of cloth would have been revealing.

‘You can take that bed,’ I said. ‘There’s space in the cupboard. The bathroom’s through that door.’

‘Oh. Yes. Okay.’ But he still didn’t put down his bag.

I’d only heard two weeks before that I would have to share a room. Dr Ngema had called me in. I wasn’t happy, but I didn’t refuse. And in the days that followed I came around, in spite of myself, to the idea of sharing. It might not be so bad. We might get on well, it might be good to have company, my life here could be pleasantly different. So in a way I started looking forward with curiosity to this change. And before he arrived I did a few things to make him welcome. I put the new bed under the window and made it up with fresh linen. I cleared a few shelves in the cupboard. I swept and cleaned, which is something I don’t do very often.

But room was ugly and bare. And Laurence Waters didn’t look to me like the person I’d pictured in my head. I now that he was standing here I could see, through his eyes, how invisible that effort was. The don’t know what I’d imagined, but it wasn’t this bland, biscuit-coloured young man, almost a boy still, who was at last putting his suitcase down.

He took his glasses off and rubbed them on his sleeve. He put them on again and said wearily, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘What?’

‘This whole place.’

‘The hospital?’

‘Not just the hospital. I mean...’ He waved a hand to indicate the world out there. He meant the town outside the hospital walls.

‘You asked to come here.’

‘But I didn’t know that it would be like this. Why?’ he said with sudden intensity. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘We can talk about it later. But I’m on duty now, I have to go back to the office.’

‘I must see Dr Ngema,’ he said abruptly. ‘She’s expecting me.’

‘Don’t worry about that now. You can do it in the morning. No hurry.’

‘What should I do now?’

‘Whatever you like. Unpack, settle in. Or come and sit with me. I’ll be finished in a couple of hours.’

I left him alone and went back. He was shocked and depressed. I understood that; I’d felt it myself when I first arrived. You came expecting one thing and were met by something else completely.

You came expecting a busy modern hospital – rural maybe, and small, but full of activity – in a town where things were happening. This was the capital of what used to be one of the homelands, so whatever the morality of the politics that gave rise to it, you expected a place full of administration and movement, people coming and going. And when you’d turned off the main route to the border and were coming in on the one minor road that led here, it might still look – when you saw the place from a distance – like what you’d expected. There was the main street, leading to the centre where the fountain and the statue stood, the shop-fronts and pavements and streetlights, and all the buildings beyond. It looked neat and calibrated and exact. Not a bad place to be.

And then you arrived and you saw. Maybe the first clue was a disturbing detail; a crack that ran through an otherwise pristine wall, or a set of broken windows in an office you passed. Or the fact that the fountain was dry and full of old sand at the bottom. And you slowed down, looking around you with vague anxiety, and suddenly it all came into clear focus. The weeds in the joints of the pavements and bricks, the grass growing at places in the street, the fused lamps and the empty shops behind their blank glass fronts and the mildew and damp and blistered paint and the marks of rain on every surface and the slow tumbling down of solid structures, sometimes grain by grain, sometimes in pieces. And you were not sure any more of where you were.

And there were no people. That was the last thing you noticed, though you realized then that it was the first thing to give you that uneasy hollow feeling: the place was deserted. There was, yes, a car cruising slowly down a back road, an official uniform or two ambling along a pavement, and maybe a figure slouching on a footpath through an overgrown plot of land, but mostly the space was empty. Uninhabited. No human chaos, no movement.

A ghost town.

‘It’s like something terrible happened here,’ Laurence said. ‘That’ s how it feels.’

‘Ja, but the opposite is true. Nothing has ever happened here. Nothing ever will. That’s the problem.’

From the Hardcover edition. --Este texto se refere à uma edição alternativa kindle_edition

Sobre o Autor

DAMON GALGUT was born in Pretoria in 1963. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season, when he was seventeen. His other books include Small Circle of Beings, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, The Quarry and The Good Doctor. The Good Doctor was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Damon Galgut lives in Cape Town. --Este texto se refere à uma edição alternativa kindle_edition

Capa Interna

When Laurence Waters arrives at his rural hospital posting in a former homeland of the new South Africa, Frank, a fellow doctor there, is instantly suspicious. Laurence is everything Frank is not - young, optimistic, and full of new schemes. The two become uneasy friends, while the rest of the meagre staff in the deserted hospital view Laurence with a mixture of awe and mistrust.
The tired, ghostly town beyond the hospital is also coping with new arrivals, and the return of old faces. The Brigadier, a self-fashioned dictator from apartheid days, is rumoured to be still alive. And down at Mama's Place, the town's only watering hole, a group of soldiers have moved in with their malign commandant, a man Frank has met before and is keen to avoid for his own dark reasons. Laurence wants to help - but in a world where the past is demanding restitution from the present, his ill-starred idealism cannot last. --Este texto se refere à uma edição alternativa kindle_edition

Contracapa

"Galgut's prose, its gentle rhythms and straightforward sentences edging toward revelation, is utterly seductive and suspenseful.... Galgut is a master of psychological tension.... Tragic and brilliant...."
Globe and Mail

"Damon Galgut has written a lovely, lethal, disturbing novel."
- The Guardian (U.K.)

"Exquisite.... It is a testament to Galgut's skill that this mostly quiet novel can leave such a lasting sense of urgency. And shame. That, after all, is what great fiction is meant to do."
- Denver Post

"Possesses the economy and pace of Hemingway and the lyrical grace of Graham Greene...."
- Booklist

"A truly remarkable novel, steeped in contemporary history, yet at the same time transcending it. I was enthralled by its intensity and the immediacy of every small twist and turn of the story."
- André Brink

"A tremendous brave book. The author never flinches, and makes his hero's dark logic compelling and hair-rising. . . . Galgut writes like a man on a long fast night drive through bad places.... It's brilliant."
- Dermot Healy

"From the first page the reader is gripped by a rare twinning of convictions: that it is strange and new, and that the imaginative rendering is of the highest quality.... There are traces of J. M. Coetzee and Graham Greene but Damon Galgut is a true original."
- Geoff Dyer

"If there is a posterity, The Good Doctor will be seen as one of the great literary triumphs of South Africa's transition, a novel that is in every way the equal of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.... [Galgut is] a novelist of great and growing power."
- Rian Malan

From the Hardcover edition. --Este texto se refere à uma edição alternativa kindle_edition

Detalhes do produto

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00PSSG40E
Editora ‏ : ‎ Grove Press; Reprint edição (7 outubro 2014)
Idioma ‏ : ‎ Inglês
Tamanho do arquivo ‏ : ‎ 587 KB
Leitura de texto ‏ : ‎ Habilitado
Leitor de tela ‏ : ‎ Compatível
Configuração de fonte ‏ : ‎ Habilitado
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Habilitado
Dicas de vocabulário ‏ : ‎ Habilitado
Número de páginas ‏ : ‎ 172 páginas

Ranking dos mais vendidos: Nº 268,090 em Loja Kindle (Conheça o Top 100 na categoria Loja Kindle)
- Nº 392 em Importados de Ficção Política
- Nº 4,557 em Importados de Ficção
- Nº 6,317 em Literatura e ficção em inglês

Avaliações dos clientes:
855 avaliações de clientes

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4 estrelas		32%
3 estrelas		21%
2 estrelas		7%
1 estrela		4%

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FictionFan

Channelling Greene...

Avaliado no Reino Unido em 27 de abril de 2018

Compra verificada

Having retreated to a remote country hospital following the messy break-up of his marriage, Doctor Frank Eloff is in a reasonably contented rut. The hospital is in a town that was briefly the capital of a newly set-up homeland in South Africa. But politics move on, and the homeland ceased to exist when apartheid ended, so that now the town is sparsely occupied and the hospital has very few patients and only a tiny staff. But one day a new doctor shows up – young Laurence Waters, who has chosen to do his year's compulsory post-qualifying service in this remote spot. Idealistic and somewhat naive, Laurence wants to do good, and his presence becomes a catalyst for change. This is a story of disillusionment – of a man and of a country.

In both style and subject matter, the book reminded me very much of Graham Greene. Galgut has that same spare precision with words, that ability to conjure a pervading air of menace and decay, that empathetic insight into the fallibilities of human nature. His main character and narrator, Frank, also has all the attributes of a Greene protagonist – somewhat passive, without the strength of character to be either fully good or fully bad, an observer forced to become an unwilling participant. His marriage ended years ago, but he is treading water, unwilling to finalise the divorce – symbolic of the end of apartheid not yet having produced the hoped-for change. The lives of all the hospital staff are in limbo, each waiting for a change that seems increasingly unlikely – the head of the hospital waiting for promotion back to the city, Frank waiting to fill her shoes when – if – she goes, a married couple from Cuba, one wishing to return, the other wishing to stay, and their marriage slowly disintegrating under the strain.

Along comes Laurence, fresh and full of hope, forcing the others to recognise the lethargy they've sunk into. The question seems to be – will Laurence change them or will they destroy his idealistic optimism? The answer never seems in doubt.

There was much I loved about this – the writing, the characterisation of Frank, the creation of an air of uneasy melancholy and later of menace and fear. I was totally involved for well over half of the book. And then, and I can't quite put my finger on the reason, it fell away and rather lost me towards the end. I felt the plot wasn't developed well enough – it all seemed contrived to deliver an ending. (Yes, I know all plots are contrived to deliver endings, but the good ones don't feel as if they are.) The drama all takes place off the page, which does stop it reading like a thriller, which it isn't, but also somehow stops it from delivering an emotional impact. When the major event finally occurred, I found I didn't much care. And that made me realise that, although Frank is fully and excellently realised, the other characters hadn't come to life for me, not even Laurence. In a sense, I think that's part of the point – Frank is detached from emotional involvement, and therefore so are we. But even when he is finally jarred out of his apathy, his efforts at playing a more active part are half-hearted and soon over. Again, I think this is meant to be symbolic of the failure of the hopes of the new South Africa, but whatever, it left me shrugging a bit.

I also developed the impression, rightly or wrongly, that this feeling of utter depression about the state of post-apartheid South Africa was terribly white. Galgut doesn't romanticise the past in any way – quite the reverse – but he also gives no feeling for the immense hope that surely existed among black South Africans, finally free from the yoke of subjugation. Even when things didn't improve as dramatically as people hoped, I found the idea of apathetic acceptance unrealistic. I'd have expected continued hope, anger, possibly despair – not apathy. But perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps in the rural areas things went on much as they always had.

I certainly enjoyed Galgut's writing and found the book thought-provoking if not entirely convincing. I'll be looking forward to reading more of his work and, despite my reservations, I do recommend this one – although it tailed off for me at the end, I found it an absorbing and worthwhile read up to that point.

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Tham Chee Wah

I like the writing.

Avaliado no Reino Unido em 31 de maio de 2019

Compra verificada

It reminded me of Somerset Maugham and Steinbeck. Subtle. Fluid. Hypnotic. Everything and everyone is just going through life as if something will happen yet no one cares. The trees will grow, some will be chopped and no one will notice - that kind of self-imposed ignorance.

The narrator, Frank, seemed to be like that. Nothing much he has done, yet things were happening around him. The country that has just transited from apartheid to being free. Yet, what’s the difference when poverty and crimes are still rampant.

There was a sense of despair and desolation to the situations. Something like having fleas on your head, even if the condition has been treated, the itch is still delusively annoying.

The story happened close to the days when apartheid was abolished. It was still hard to immediately let go of the discrimination between the whites and blacks.

I can’t have a clear cut decision whether I like it or not. On one hand I like the lull of the mesmerizing flow of words. On the other, I was hoping to know more but a few characters were cut short.

It’s just... subtle. Yes, like the rustling of the leaves, there is wind but...

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Jonathan Oates

Thought provoking and compelling

Avaliado no Reino Unido em 23 de outubro de 2021

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I loved this book because I could see every one of the characters and feel how their lives would have been and like wise I could see the landscape and the town and feel it’s rhythms. Partly because I have been to such places but largely because of the skill of the writer. It was haunting and compelling to read, driven by the characters and events. It’s a beautiful book but a sad one too.

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Neasa MacErlean

The battle of innocence and violent power

Avaliado no Reino Unido em 24 de agosto de 2017

Compra verificada

In the Graham Greene tradition, The Good Doctor shows an ailing society (South Africa) through the portrayal of a small, dysfunctional group of people within it. At a remote 'homeland' hospital, the uninspired and cynical staff outnumber the patients. When a young innocent doctor arrives, it seems possible that things will change. Or is the depth of local corruption too profound to allow a new start? Maybe I make the book sound a bit lofty but it catches the small habits and weariness of its characters in a way that makes them surge into life. Galgut writes brilliantly — especially about powerful, violent men. Read this, for instance: "Though she didn't touch him it was as though she'd put a hand on his arm. And I saw that I was wrong to think that his power had been taken from him. He was still a dangerous man, as dangerous as anybody who will do anything he wants to you in a locked room somewhere, and he gave off his power like the metallic smell of sex."

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Ioannis Touras

Brilliant discovery

Avaliado no Reino Unido em 14 de janeiro de 2022

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I would never have known or learned Damon Galgut if it wasn't for his Booker win. I'm so glad this happened and I'm now able to say I found a new author whom I will cherish and follow. The Good Doctor is a good introduction to his world, his writing. That feeling of alienation that Frank is living all through the book, of the country that is South Africa, but still in that time out of time, it's magnificent. A worthy reading.

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