“The Promise” by Damon Galgut: Discrepancies Between Different Editions and Between Reality and What a Character Sees in The Mirror (a symptom of MPD)

Small girl looking at her mother’s things. She knows all of it by heart, how many steps from the door to the bed, where the light switch is for the lamp, the swirly orange pattern in the carpet like the onset of a headache, etc., etc. Out the corner of her eye she thinks she sees Ma’s face appear in the mirror, but when she looks directly it’s gone. Instead she can smell her mother, or a mix of smells she thinks of as her mother, but are actually the traces of recent events, involving puke, incense, blood medicine, perfume and an underlying dark note, perhaps the smell of the sickness itself. Exhaled by the walls, hovering in the air.

She’s not here.

Her sister Astrid speaking, who has somehow spotted her and followed.

They took her away.

I know that. I saw.

Comment: In the above passage, quotation marks and complete speaker identification are missing in this edition (1 p. 34).

This edition has 269 pages, but today’s Wikipedia on this novel uses a different publisher with 242 pages, so everyone is not reading the same edition.

Comment on Mirror: The character sees a face in the mirror that is not there, which is a symptom of multiple personality disorder (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder) (2, p. 62). But since no character is given that diagnosis, the mirror symptom may reflect the author's creative asset, Multiple Personality Trait.

1. Damon Galgut. The Promise. New York, Europa Editions, This edition, 2022.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.