Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : B : Brink, Andre

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Rumours of Rain

Andre Brink
The Other Side of Silence

Andre Brink
A Dry White Season

Andre Brink
Praying Mantis

Andre Brink
Islands

Dan Sleigh
Rumors of Rain

Andre Philippus Brink
States of Emergency

Andre Brink
An Act of Terror

Andre Brink
A Chain of Voices

Andre Brink
A Land Apart: A Contemporary South African Reader
Instant in the Wind

Andre Brink
Praying Mantis

Andre Brink
On the Contrary: Being the Life of a Famous Rebel, Soldier, Traveller, Explorer, Reader, Builder, Scribe, Latinist, Lover and Liar

Andre Brink
Dry White Season

Andre Brink
Other Lives

Andre Brink
The Blue Door

Andre Brink
An Instant in the Wind

Andre Brink
Devil's Valley

Andre Brink
Looking on Darkness

Andre Brink
The Rights of Desire

Andre Brink

Andre Brink's The Rights of Desire concerns a retired librarian's infatuation with his young lodger. Ruben Olivier, as the ageing lecher, is resolutely unsympathetic. He pathetically spends weeks sifting through the dust in his basement because the beloved's navel ring has fallen through a crack in the floorboards. When Tessa, the lodger brings home a black man, Zolani, he nearly has a heart attack, musing after he has recovered his breath: "It was unworthy and I knew it. Yet how could I not wonder about it?--Zolani is welcomed into her bed but I am still denied ... her exasperating and prodigal beauty, distributed like alms among the poor. Only I remained denied." His relationship to literature and music is similarly self-aggrandizing and precious: "I went to Spain with Don Quixote--I still go every year in the summer--and to St Petersburg with Dostoevsky every winter. In between, I go to Paris with Balzac, or with Zola if I feel up to it." It is as difficult to like Tessa, who, in addition to being a little bit slutty and nutty is also a compulsive liar.
Cluttered around their doomed but mutually sustaining love affair is the atrocious exhibition of the white post-apartheid narration of the suburbs. Olivier's best friend is brutally murdered and failing to recognise the crumpled pile of rags on the side of the road Olivier drives by. Tessa narrowly escapes being gang raped in the Newlands forest. The novel equivocates between claiming that all this sex and violence is a function of contemporary social collapse or may simply be an expression of the timeless beauty and violence of Cape Town. Woven into the story of Ruben and Tessa is the story of Antje of Bengal, a 17th-century slave girl, whose ghost haunts the house and the story of Magrieta, Olivier's housekeeper, who is forced to flee her home after an episode of township violence. At times over-ripe, this novel is at it most compelling in its characterisation of this pair. --Neville Hoad