South Africa's conflicted heart

Galgut is the author of five other books, including "The Good Doctor" which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003.

Galgut spoke while traveling in India.

Q. Your first novel, "A Sinless Season," was published when you were 17. How did you come to writing so early?

A. Actually, "A Sinless Season" was my third completed novel. I already had two (I'm sure terrible) books under my belt by the age of 15. I think the impulse took shape in early childhood when I was very ill with lymphoma for a number of years. I spent a lot of time in hospitals and sick-rooms, being read to by various relatives, and I learned to associate books with love and attention. From there it was a short hop to creating stories for myself. That, at least, is the retrospective explanation that makes the most sense to me.

Q. You grew up in apartheid South Africa and live in post-apartheid South Africa. How does that influence your writing?

A. It's hard to say. Any radical change or trauma always makes for interesting subject matter, but then all stories deal, to some extent, with the disjuncture between past and present. I feel much more at home, in a creative sense, in the new South Africa. Things have become far more ambiguous, far more morally nuanced. I like the irony and contradiction I see around me. It's a bit of a mess, historically speaking, but viewed through a writer's amoral lens, it's certainly not dull.

Q. Do you feel obliged to remind your readers of what went before?

A. Obliged, no. Those years have been so exhaustively documented that they aren't likely to be forgotten quickly. But it's hard, if not impossible here to write about the present without picking up a stray thread that leads to the past.

You can't write a middle-aged character, for example, without wondering what he or she did in the old days, and what their moral position was. In some ways it's quite tedious, this endless awareness of "before, before." One tries, in a literary sense, to make it surprising and unexpected.

Q. Your work has been compared to that of J.M. Coetzee. How does that strike you?

A. Well, the comparison is flattering, obviously. But it's also a false one, and it begins to feel like a weight on my back. I'm considering writing a frivolous sexual comedy to throw off any likeness.

Q. Reading "The Impostor," I was reminded at times of Rian Malan's extraordinary memoir "My Traitor's Heart." Does that make sense?

A. I'm not sure what similarities you see, but the connection doesn't make me unhappy. Rian Malan was one of the first younger writers to perceive and write about a darkness in the South African psyche that goes deeper than mere politics. To some extent, that's my territory too.

Q. Your novel "The Good Doctor" depicts the awkward friendship between two men in a rural hospital, and "The Impostor" another fraught friendship. Are you preoccupied with misunderstanding, with mistaken identity?

A. It's expected of novels that they should explain the world, and create the illusion that things are ultimately logical and coherent. But that's not what I see around me. Often events remain mysterious and unresolved, and our emotions reach no catharsis. I want to be true to that sense of things, while keeping some sort of literary balance. Why shouldn't plot be driven by a lack of understanding, by a missed connection, rather than the opposite?

Q. Or by a sense of loss?

A. Indeed. As time accumulates, nothing marks its passage more than what we lose along the way. I sometimes think that all of writing is powered by a primitive feeling of loss, which the writer is trying to "repair" somehow.

Q. The land has the presence of a character in your work. Is that inevitable when you write about South Africa?

A. Perhaps. The land itself has been at the center of so much dispute, and also the subject of so much romantic projection, that it tends to occupy one's focus. It's also what I miss most when I'm away. But part of this is my own temperament as a writer. Landscape, setting, a sense of place - these matter as much (and sometimes more) than the characters.

Q. Yet "The Impostor" is also a wonderfully claustrophobic novel.

A. Yes, people have commented on the claustrophobic element. I lived in that part of South Africa - the Karoo - for a couple of years, and although it's vast, exposed and open, when your own psyche is locked into itself, even the sky can become oppressive. I was struggling to write there, and became obsessed with clearing weeds in the back yard as a substitute. Something of my internal block, I guess, got woven into the story.

Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached by e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com.