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Andre Brink was born in South Africa in 1925. He is the author of thirteen novels in English, including An Instant in the Wind, A Dry White Season, A Chain of Voices, An Act of Terror, On the Contrary, Imaginings of Sand, Devil's Valley and, most recently, The Rights of Desire. He has won South Africa's most important literary prize, the CAN Award, three times and has twice been short-listed for the Booker Prize. He has been awarded the Prix Medicis Etranger in France and the Premio Mondello in Italy. His novels have been translated into thirty languages. Andre Brink is Professor of English at the University of Cape Town. He has three sons and a daughter.
In a London hotel, on a business trip, Afrikaner mining tycoon Martin Mynhardt is writing down - at great length, with great self-consciousness - his memories of the weekend before the Soweto riots. It was the weekend he and his surly son Louis (recently returned from fighting in Angola, South Africa's Vietnam) went to the family farm to badger Martin's plucky mother into selling the drought-ridden estate, now dominated by cheeky blacks. It was the weekend of the murder of a black farm servant by her tradition-obsessed husband. It was the weekend just after Martin's best friend, lawyer Bernard, had been sentenced to life imprisonment for anti-apartheid terrorism. (Martin had refused to help him hide out.) And it was the weekend that Martin's longtime mistress Bea finally became fed up with her compartmentalized role in Martin's life. Martin remembers all this, and earlier memories too - of his historian father, of his doomed attempts at camaraderie with black colleagues, of his mildly corrupt business practices. And running through these memories are Martin's self-examinations and self-justifications: Without cynicism one had no hope of retaining one's hold on reality. Innocence vs. guilt, romanticism vs. pragmatism, detached perspective vs. violent commitment. Brink has done a masterful job of crafting Martin's repetitious, digressive musings around the tight framework of that single weekend. And the portrait of an intelligent, decent Afrikaner clinging to the old ways ( To surrender everything to Black hands is to exchange the wind for the whirlwind ) is convincing and especially effective as presented here - without explicit author condemnation. Less admirable, however, is Brink's insistence on investing every aspect of Martin's life with political import, spelling out every theme: Perhaps there is a similar transition from a state of innocence to a state of guilt in historical processes. Self-deluding, self-dramatizing Martin is certainly a useful figure for Brink's meditation on the Afrikaner paradox; he is not, however, the engaging character needed to lift this worthy, interesting, and talented book (a vast improvement over Brink's previous windy polemics) from an intriguing study to an emotional experience. (Kirkus Reviews)
