The Persistence of Memory

In The Persistence of Memory, Tony Eprile fuses political and cultural satire with a coming-of-age story to render South Africa's turbulent past.
The novel opens in the early 1970s. Its hero, Paul Sweetbread, a young boy in Johannesburg's northern suburbs, discovers that he is endowed with the "poisoned gift" of a perfect memory. This is a dangerous thing to have in a society where the official story is everything. His teachers spout the government's sanitized version of history, and most of the white population seek safety in what Paul describes as the "national dysmnesia, the art of the rose-colored recall." By remembering, Paul finds himself unwittingly revealing the cruelties that underlie the pleasant blandness of suburban life in a time of political upheaval, the difficulties of being Jewish under Afrikaner nationalism, and the dark secret behind his father's tragic death. He is soon at odds with his authoritarian teachers, his schoolfellows, and even his doting mother, a character seemingly plucked out of a Checkhov story.
Following the completion of high school, Paul is conscripted into the South African army, and is soon plunged into the secret wars in the deserts between Namibia and Angola. Paul encounters the full range of human cruelty and discovers his own complicity in the political system he abhors. The brutal ramifications of his actions continue to haunt him, and, in one of the novel's most astonishing twists, Paul appears before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in an attempt to reconcile his harrowing past and uncertain future.
The novel provides a portrait of apartheid in its waning years. We see a South Africa that casts a dark reflection on the American heart that cannot be ignored.