Andre Brink – författare

New York Times Notable Book: This story of life and death in apartheid-era South Africa is “a powerful novel that you will not easily put down or forget” (Los Angeles Times).Winner of a Martin Luther King Memorial PrizeAs startling and powerful as when it was first published more than forty years ago, André Brink’s classic novel, A Dry White Season, is an unflinching and unforgettable look at racial intolerance, the human condition, and the heavy price of morality.Ben Du Toit is a white schoolteacher in suburban Johannesburg in a dark time of intolerance and state-sanctioned apartheid. A simple, apolitical man, he believes in the essential fairness of the South African government and its policies—until the sudden arrest and subsequent “suicide” of a black janitor from Du Toit’s school. Haunted by new questions and desperate to believe that the man’s death was a tragic accident, Du Toit undertakes an investigation into the terrible affair—a quest for the truth that will have devastating consequences for the teacher and his family, as it draws him into a lethal morass of lies, corruption, and murder.“His most impressive novel thus far . . . [a] compelling angle from which to view apartheid and its corrosive effect on all of South African society.” —The New York Times“Excellent . . . [a] harrowing and surprising story.” —Scotsman“Andre Brink’s writing is built on conviction . . . A Dry White Season describes the triumph of tyranny.” —The Times“Powerful and provocative . . . exciting, well written, and a literary achievement of the first rank.” —Houston Chronicle“Impossible to recommend too highly.” —Time Out

Flip Lochner is a weary and disillusioned newspaper crime reporter. Curious to find out more about the origins of a casual acquaintance, he descends into Devil's Valley where, like Dante's Virgil, he encounters a bewildering array of mysterious characters and events that lead him to reevaluate the world in which he lives and which he thought he knew. Fusing invention and reality, magic realism and earthy humour, Lochner's adventures in the valley centre around the journey he undertakes to discover the truth about the elusive and erotic figure of Emma, one of Brink's most remarkable creations.

The First Life of Adamastor has it origins in an act of rescue: what, wondered André Brink, lay behind fragments of myth that have been handed down about the mountains of the Cape? Adamastor, the Titan whose body, legend has it, formed the rocks of the Peninsula, first appears in European literature in the sixteenth century - much about the time of the first known contact between seagoing European explorers and the natives of Southern Africa. How, Brink asks, would that meeting have looked from the landward side? What role would the visitors take in the mythology of an utterly different culture, with its own deities, its own accumulated story? Brink, in this extraordinary, moving and potentially explosive creation has unearthed from the sun-carved land itself the missing meanings of a myth that has waited five centuries to be invented.

Chris Minaar is a distinguished South African writer, an old writer, but a writer who has lost whatever gift he had for writing. It is on New Year's Eve, courtesy of his stalled car, that he meets Rachel, a young sculptress who becomes the great love of his life, a love greater for being unfulfilled. He finds himself captivated by Rachel and drawn into a close friendship with her husband. As their friendship develops, Chris must reconcile himself to an unaccustomed type of intimacy but one that inevitably threatens this precarious triangular relationship. Woven through this is the story of his life and of a lifetime's loving. For he has known many women. As it becomes clear that this book is the final writing act of Chris's creative life, so we understand that these recollections are an attempt to bring order to an otherwise chaotic existence. Before I Forget is the history of a life set against the history of a nation, and the history of a transforming love.

Ben du Toit is an ordinary, decent, harmless man, unremarkable in every way - until his sense of justice is outraged by the death of a man he has known. His friend died at the hands of the police. In the beginning it appears a straightforward matter, an unfortunate error that can be explained and put right. But as Ben investigates further he finds that his curiosity becomes labelled rebellion - and for a rebel there is no way back.

"The novel, Brink argues, is not about representation but the self-conscious play of language. From its inception, he suggests, the genre has been about the act of writing and self-reflection. This thesis is not new but is part of the currency of postmodern literary theory. Brink, himself a noted South African novelist, the author of some 12 books, including A Dry White Season (1984), and a university professor, brings the insight of an insider. He surveys 15 celebrated novels, historically arranged from Don Quixote and La Princesse de Cleves to A.S. Byatt's Possession and Italo Calvino's If on a Winter Night a Traveller examining each in terms of its play with writing and language. His discussions are marked by clarity, insight, and comprehension. A valuable book." --Thomas L. Cooksey, Library Journal "What a treat to explore the novel as a genre through the lucid eyes of Andre Brink, himself one of the world's foremost novelists! I particularly enjoyed the way in which the most traditional novels were revealed as contemporary and entirely relevant." --Ariel Dorfman The postmodernist novel has become famous for the extremes of its narcissistic involvement with language.In this challenging and wide-ranging new study, Andre Brink argues that this self-consciousness has been a defining characteristic of the novel since its inception. Taking as his starting point "the propensity for story" embedded in all language, he demonstrates that the old familiar novels may be the more startlingly modern, while postmodernist texts remain more firmly rooted in convention. From the beginnings of the genre with Don Quixote, through "classic" novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and modern and postmodern texts of the twentieth, Brink performs a sweeping analysis of 500 years of the novel, including Moll Flanders, Emma, Madame Bovary, The Trial, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Possession. As an internationally recognized novelist, he brings a unique critical eye and enthusiasm to his exploration of the genre, offering the reader a refreshing and rewarding introduction to the novel and narrative theory.

The Postmodernist novel has become famous for the extremes of its narcissistic involvement with language. In this challenging and wide-ranging new study, André Brink argues that this self-consciousness has been a characteristic of the novel since its earliest stirrings. More specifically, every novel appears both to construct, and to be constructed by, its own notion of language, elaborated through all the strategies of narrative. Taking as his starting point ''the propensity for story'' embedded in language, he offers stimulating new readings of novels from Cervantes to Calvino, demonstrating that in many respects the old familiar texts may be more startlingly modern, and the Postmodernist texts more firmly rooted in convention, than we tend to think.

This is André Brink's story of a life lived in tumultuous times. He describes with searing honesty his conflicting experiences of growing up in a world where innocence was always surrounded by violence and storytelling was a means of reconciling the stark contrasts of his world. His time spent in Paris in the 1960s confirmed in him the desire to become a writer but his opposition to the apartheid establishment resulted in years of harassment by the South African secret police; it also led to extraordinary friendships with leaders of the ANC in exile.A Fork in the Road is André Brink's love song to the country where he was born and where, despite recent tragedies, he still lives today.

In a telegram sent on 29 April 1963, Ingrid Jonker thanks André Brink for his letter and flowers. They had met a few days before. He was almost twenty- eight; she thirty. This was the beginning of a correspondence between two writers that lasted up until three months before Jonker drowned herself at Three Anchor Bay. Half a century later, their love letters are published here for the first time. In more than two hundred letters that have never been seen before, a gripping love affair unfolds.

In a telegram sent on 29 April 1963, Ingrid Jonker thanks André Brink for his letter and flowers. They had met a few days before. He was almost twenty- eight; she thirty. This was the beginning of a correspondence between two writers that lasted up until three months before Jonker drowned herself at Three Anchor Bay. Half a century later, their love letters are published here for the first time. In more than two hundred letters that have never been seen before, a gripping love affair unfolds.

Op 29 April 1963 stuur Ingrid Jonker ’n telegram aan André P. Brink om dankie te sê vir blomme en ’n brief wat hy vir haar gestuur het. Hulle het mekaar ’n paar dae tevore ontmoet. Hy was agt-en-twintig; sy ’n jaar ouer. Só begin ’n briewewisseling tussen twee skrywers wat duur tot sy laaste brief aan haar in April 1965. Jonker verdrink haarself by Drie ankerbaai drie maande daarna. ’n Halfeeu later kom hulle liefdesbriewe vir die eerste keer aan die lig en ontvou daar in meer as tweehonderd skrywes een van Suid-Afrika se aangrypendste liefdesverhoudings.

Op 29 April 1963 stuur Ingrid Jonker ’n telegram aan André P. Brink om dankie te sê vir blomme en ’n brief wat hy vir haar gestuur het. Hulle het mekaar ’n paar dae tevore ontmoet. Hy was agt-en-twintig; sy ’n jaar ouer. Só begin ’n briewewisseling tussen twee skrywers wat duur tot sy laaste brief aan haar in April 1965. Jonker verdrink haarself by Drie ankerbaai drie maande daarna. ’n Halfeeu later kom hulle liefdesbriewe vir die eerste keer aan die lig en ontvou daar in meer as tweehonderd skrywes een van Suid-Afrika se aangrypendste liefdesverhoudings.

Ruben Oliver's life is coming adrift from its moorings. He has been obliged to take early retirement from his job as a librarian due to 'rationalisation' and the new political realities of South Africa. His wife has died. One of his sons has settled in Australia, the other is about to emigrate to Canada while trying to persuade Ruben that it is too dangerous to remain. The only constants are his old family home, haunted by the ghost of a young slave woman; and his housekeeper, Magrieta, with whom he has a shared history that goes back more than half his life. When Tessa Butler comes out of the rain one night in response to an advertisement for a lodger, Ruben is captivated by her. She restores passion to his life, but brings with her a turbulent past.

Flip Lochner is a weary and disillusioned newspaper crime reporter. Curious to find out more about the origins of a casual acquaintance, he descends into Devil's Valley where, like Dante's Virgil, he encounters a bewildering array of mysterious characters and events that lead him to reevaluate the world in which he lives and which he thought he knew. Fusing invention and reality, magic realism and earthy humour, Lochner's adventures in the valley centre around the journey he undertakes to discover the truth about the elusive and erotic figure of Emma, one of Brink's most remarkable creations.

THE BOOK: A narrative counterpoint between two women, two South Africas. Kristien Muller returns from London to her homeland to fulfil a promise. Her grandmother lies on her deathbed unleashing a turmult of myth, legend and brute fact. Confronted by the realities of a land hurtling towards change, Kristien discovers that the present holds its own moments of savagery. A searing panorama of South Africa's experience, reminiscent in its political & imaginative scope of Marquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude.

It is 1825 and high in the mountains of South Africa a group of slavesstand accused of the murder of their owner, Nicolass van der Merwe, a wealthy Afrikaner farmer. Galant, the van der Merwe family's chief hand, is held leader of the murderous band. Raised with the two sonsof the house, it was not until adulthood and rivalry over Hester, orphaned daughter of a tenant farmer, that he realised their differentroles, their unequal futures and opposed stations in life. A CHAIN OFVOICES stands as a prophetic lesson - when hopes of freedom from slavery are dashed, and when promises of equal treatment are broken, an escalating spiral of bitterness, resentment, and finally, explosiveviolence is inevitable.

Banned for many years in the author's native South Africa, Looking on Darkness tells the story of actor Joseph Malan as he awaits execution for the murder of his white lover. André Brink panders to no one's political, ideological or religious beliefs in a controversial novel which has achieved international significance and abundant critical acclaim.From three time winner of South Africa's most prestigious literary prize, the CNA Award.

Ben du Toit is an ordinary, decent, harmless man, unremarkable in every way - until his sense of justice is outraged by the death of a man he has known. His friend died at the hands of the police. In the beginning it appears a straightforward matter, an unfortunate error that can be explained and put right. But as Ben investigates further he finds that his curiosity becomes labelled rebellion - and for a rebel there is no way back.

In early 1749 a white woman and a black man are stranded in the wilderness of the South African interior. She is an educated woman, totally helpless in the wilds. He is a runaway slave. They know only each other. At first their relationship is guarded, poisoned by the black and white in them both. But hesitantly there emerges between them a fellowship that engulfs their most private selves, as they face the long trek back to civilisation.

`A massive apartheid thriller centred on a plot to blow up none other than the State President outside the gates of Cape Town Castle. . . Brink at his robust and imaginative best' - Adam Low, Daily Telegraph.A profound novel set in South Africa that combines compelling action with an intellectual confrontation of the author's poitically volatile home country. A brave masterpiece from Booker Prize shortlisted, award-winning author André Brink.

Estienne Barbier, born in the Loire Valley in 1699, lays claim to service in the armies of the kings of France and Prussia, but he is an inveterate liar, and the truth is less glorious: irate husbands have made the Lowlands too hot to hold him, and he has deserted his pregnant wife to stow away for the Cape of Good Hope. An expedition to the hinterland opens his eyes to the majesty of the African landscape and its wondrous animals and he is enchanted by the rumour of a fabled city of gold. But he also begins to see clearly the sordid dealing that underlies the self-righteous pomposity of the East India Company. It is a vision that makes him powerful enemies. Taking cover on a remote farm, and energetically consoling sundry widows, Barbier finds himself, to his own surprise, fomenting rebellion.

Winter in South Africa - a time of searing drought, angry stirrings in Soweto, and the shadow of the Angolan conflict cast across the scorched bush.Martin Mynhardt, a wealthy Afrikaner, plans a weekend at his old family farm. But his visit coincides with a time of crisis in his personal life. In a few days, the security of a lifetime is destroyed and, with only the uncertain values of his past to guide him, Mynhardt is left to face the wreckage of his future.

The First Life of Adamastor has it origins in an act of rescue: what, wondered André Brink, lay behind fragments of myth that have been handed down about the mountains of the Cape? Adamastor, the Titan whose body, legend has it, formed the rocks of the Peninsula, first appears in European literature in the sixteenth century - much about the time of the first known contact between seagoing European explorers and the natives of Southern Africa. How, Brink asks, would that meeting have looked from the landward side? What role would the visitors take in the mythology of an utterly different culture, with its own deities, its own accumulated story? Brink, in this extraordinary, moving and potentially explosive creation has unearthed from the sun-carved land itself the missing meanings of a myth that has waited five centuries to be invented.

The Blue Door is built around one of the oldest questions in storytelling: What if ...? What if I return home one day to find, behind a familiar door, an unfamiliar world? What if the people closest to me turn out to be strangers? What if strangers start claiming a place in my life I cannot imagine? What if the memories of the most important moments in my life can no longer be trusted? What if I am not who I think I am? David le Roux, a teacher recently turned fulltime artist, returns to his studio one afternoon to find his whole familiar world turned upside down. The woman who opens the door and welcomes him as her husband is a complete stranger to him: beautiful and loving, but not the wife he assumes he has been married to for nine years. The children are overjoyed at his return, but he has never set eyes on them before. And when he goes back to the building he believes he lives in, it no longer exists. Has everything in his life been illusion? Or is the past real and only the present a hallucination? In a country like South Africa these questions may decide a whole life.Instead of living with the consequences of early choices he now discovers that behind every choice made lurks the possibility of innumerable other choices not made. What if, indeed ...?