Full Description

Other Lives

In just one morning, he forgot who he was...

Three provocative and interconnected stories from one of the world's greatest living writers:

A white painter in Africa comes to his studio in the afternoon. On his doorstep, he sees a woman with curly hair and a dark complexion. He has never seen her before, but she embraces him. As he steps past her, two strange children rush to his feet yelling "Daddy!" This family welcomes him home, but he knows none of them.

On the other side of Cape Town, a white man pulls himself out of bed and toward his mirror, where he is confronted by his suddenly black face.

A concert pianist falls passionately in love with the celebrated singer he works beside, but cannot bring himself to touch her, until one night they sit down to eat dinner, and look up to see themselves surrounded by armed men.

In this new novel, Andre Brink is at his best, exploring the fractured yet globalized world where we find ourselves and our lives transformed.

PRAISE FOR ANDRE BRINK

"South African novelist Brink is a master stylist."
Publishers Weekly

"Brink describes calamities and absurdities of the apartheid system with a cold lucidity that in no way interferes with high emotion and daring flights of the imagination."
Mario Vargas Llosa, New York Times Book Review

"One of the most important and prolific voices from South Africa."
Library Journal

"If you want to get the feeling of South Africa, as strongly as Camus gives you the feeling of Algiers, you will turn to André Brink."
Tribune

"Brink writes feelingly of South Africa—the land, the black, the white, the terrible beauty and tragedy that lies therein."
Publishers Weekly

"Brink is a hard-eyed storyteller."
Philadelphia Inquirer

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Excerpt

Excerpt

Excerpt from The Blue Door

1
THERE WAS, FIRST, THE DREAM.WHICH SHOULD have alerted me, except that I’m not normally into dreams. But this one I found strangely disquieting, and carried it with me, like a persistent tune in my head, throughout that long day. Until the shocking moment in the early dusk. The kind of moment that once turned the life of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa upside down. But this was not fiction. It happened. And to me.

Not that the dream had any direct bearing on what happened in the evening. But in some subliminal way, and with hindsight, there did seem to be a connection which I have not been able to figure out. Nor, I must confess, have I tried. I believe that dreams belong to the night in which they’re dreamt and should preferably not be allowed to spill into the day. This time it was different.

In the dream I am embarking on a long journey with my family, moving house. My wife Lydia is there, but also three children, three little girls, very blonde, with very blue eyes. This is perturbing. We do not have children, and after nine years of marriage it still hurts, although both of us have become skilled at pretending it doesn’t matter; not anymore. Lydia gets into the front of the truck with the driver. The girls are already in the back, perched high up on the mountain of furniture like little monkeys. I join them and we drive off very slowly, the load swaying precariously. It is a sweltering day and the children are perspiring profusely, strands of their blonde hair clinging to their cheeks and foreheads.

They seem to have difficulty breathing. Before we have reached the first corner, I realize that we will never make it like this. We need water for the journey for the children to survive. I start hammering with my hands on the cabin of the truck. The driver stops and peers up at me, a surly expression on his thick face which is turning an ominous purple.

“I’ve got to get water for the kids,” I explain. “I left three bottles on the kitchen sink.”
“We don’t have time,” growls the driver.
“I won’t be long,” I insist. “And they won’t survive without water in this heat.”

He mutters a reply, mercifully inaudible, and I jump off.

“Just drive on slowly,” I try to placate him. “I’ll soon catch up with you.”
The girls begin to cry, but I give them a reassuring wave as I trot off into the simmering and searing white day.

Only when I arrive at the kitchen door do I realize that I have no keys with me. Glancing round to give another wave to the children, I hurriedly begin to jog around the house to find a means of entry. Only after three exhausting rounds do I spot a half-open window. In the distance, the truck is beginning to disappear in a cloud of dust.

I manage to climb into the house and collect the bottles of water. They are ice cold against my chest. But now the window through which I have entered is barred, and I lose precious time rushing this way and that through the house. Everything seems locked and bolted. I become aware of rising panic inside me.

Then at last, somehow, in the inexplicable manner of dreams, I am outside again, still clutching the water bottles to my chest. By now the truck is nowhere to be seen. Only a small cloud of dust, the size of a man’s hand, hangs in the distance.

I start running. In the heat my legs turn to lead. But I persevere. I have to, otherwise my family will be lost: they do not know where we are heading for, I am the only one who knows the address. On and on I run. From time to time I catch a glimpse of the diminishing truck. On, on, on. I have to. I just have to.

In the distance I can hear the thin voices of the children wailing, more and more faintly. Once I believe I can hear Lydia calling:

“David! David, hurry!”

Then that, too, dies away. In the ferocious glare of the day I redouble my efforts. But in the end I am forced to admit that it is useless. I shall never catch up with the truck. I shall never see Lydia and the children again.

That was where the dream ended.

Reviews

Reviews

ForeWord
In this triptych of a novel, three main characters—white men in the prime of their professional lives—appear in three separate yet related stories set in Cape Town, South Africa in present times. Driven by their careers, loved by flawed but beautiful women, all are in the pursuit of passion and recognition and driven by a nameless hunger.

In the first story, 44 year-old artist David le Roux leaves his studio at the end of the day and finds himself coming home, not to his wife Lydia, but to a dark-skinned woman named Sarah and two children he has never seen before. In the second story, a 42 year-old architect named Steve looks in the mirror one morning to find that he is no longer white, but black. And in the final story, 52 year-old concert pianist Derek Hugo pursues a famous soprano whose attainment may mean a Faustian bargain of sorts.

In these three stories, two of the characters become victims in an armed robbery. As Steve laments: “These are not down-and-outs driven by need. This is the New South Africa. Thugs smelling of expensive aftershave.” Throughout the novel, a sense of unreality prevails, and the characters’ carefully planned-out lives are stripped down until the cost to each is revealed. For David, who suddenly recognizes “I have never done an uncalculated, unpremeditated thing in my life,” it was in having given up the black woman he loved but did not marry; for Steve it lies in the hubris and deception that allowed his career to rise, and for Derek, it is his unrequited obsession with a haunted and mysterious woman.

Underlying all is the post-apartheid political landscape in which human values have been degraded. And, as the characters attempt to navigate Escher’s surreal staircase, or cling to a precipice on Breughel’s Tower of Babel, they come to realize that the language they have always used no longer carries the same meaning. Each enters a portal—a door, a mirror, a dark sexual fantasy— from which there may be no escape.

André Brink is one of South Africa’s most distinguished writers, and is the author of A Dry White Season, as well as several other novels, two of which have been short-listed for the Booker Prize. He has written extensively on themes of colonization and violence. (September) Sarah Christensen

Booklist
White architect David looks in the bathroom mirror one morning in Cape Town and discovers he is black. Unsettling as this revelation is, David, always the opportunist, sees that his new skin color could be an advantage in the new South Africa. Afrikaner artist Steve cannot get home to his sweet wife, but he finds he has a beautiful Xhosa wife and two lovely kids. Is this a guilty throwback to a mixed-race woman he once deserted? Then there’s frustrated white musician Derek, forced to work as an accompanist and teacher, who has sex with a gorgeous pianist and, nearly, with David’s wife. The three stories come together in a violent restaurant holdup, as eminent South African writer Brink fuses the racist past with contemporary upheaval, evoking Magritte-type scenarios of dreams, wishes, and unrealizable desires. Rooted in the post-apartheid reality, the haunting connections raise elemental issues, disquieting and passionate. Do we always want to get home?
— Hazel Rochman

Kirkus
A realistic book with surrealistic twists that allows the author to explore themes of race in contemporary South Africa.

Brink (Before I Forget, 2007, etc.) presents his narrative in three discrete but related parts. The first, "The Blue Door," begins with an allusion to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, a story that supplies an appropriate metaphor for the world Brink’s characters inhabit. David and Lydia are preparing for a dinner party with their friends Steve and Carla. As David, an artist who has recently experienced some commercial success, steps through the blue door that leads to his house, he’s greeted by cries of "Daddy!"—strange, because in their nine years of marriage he and Lydia have had no children. An even bigger shock occurs when he’s also greeted by his "wife," Sarah, a black woman of great beauty and sex appeal. Just as Gregor Samsa tries to make sense of his situation, Steve also is bewildered but ultimately accepting of this strange new world. "Mirror" involves a similar tale of transformation. This story focuses on Steve and Carla, but here Steve looks into the elaborate art nouveau mirror Carla has bought and discovers he is in fact black. Other characters take this dream reality at face value (no pun intended)—for them Steve has always been black—but Steve needs to accommodate himself to a new self-image, one that he doesn’t comfortably inhabit. Toward the end of this section he and Carla are having a quiet dinner at a local restaurant when they’re interrupted by five masked thugs. Carla startles Steve by urging him to engage these quasi-terrorists in a dialogue because "’You’re one of them.’ " The final episode follows the relationship between Derek Hugo, a pianist who teaches the two talented daughters of Steve and Carla, and Nina Rousseau, a talented but reclusive soprano, who wind up being caught in the same terrifying restaurant experience.

While at times a bit facile and almost overly clever, an ultimately fascinating commentary on race and identity.

The New York Times Book Review
A man awakes one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into — wait, haven’t we heard this story before? This time, the setting is post-apartheid Cape Town, the transformee a vain white architect who specializes in stark modernism and attributes his success to having scrupulously avoided taking a political stance under the old regime. His Gregor Samsa moment comes when, while shaving, he peers into the mirror and sees a black face looking back.

It’s a less subtle metamorphosis than Kafka’s — and not so much a premise as a provocation — but the Afrikaner writer André Brink has always confronted the troubles of his homeland head-on. Early in his career, he chronicled in searing realist fiction the evils of the government’s racial segregation policy. Since the abolition of apartheid and the establishment of a democratic republic, his work has veered toward myth­ography, plumbing the colonial origins of oppression. In his latest book, he moves fully into phantasmagoria. Brink’s publisher is calling it “a novel in three parts,” but “Other Lives” is more properly a collection of surreal fables, connected by theme and characters but lacking an overarching plot.

Each of Brink’s three narrators is a white middle-aged male — or, at least, starts off that way. Steve, the modernist architect, is appalled to be thrust into blackness, apparently via the mystical powers of an ornate antique bathroom mirror (his grudging capitulation to his wife’s taste for Victoriana). His first wild thought is that once discovered crouching naked in his white family’s hilltop mansion, he’ll be “pursued to the ends of the earth, hunted down, bludgeoned to death, a messy pulp.” Regaining equilibrium, he looks on the bright side: perhaps in the new South Africa his change in race is a career advantage.

Meanwhile, David, an amateur painter, opens the door to his studio and is embraced by a gorgeous woman, “dark of complexion,” whom he has never met. She is not, apparently, a deluded intruder: there is mail in the front hall addressed to them as husband and wife, and two little children can be heard crying, “Daddy!” It’s an appealing alternate universe in light of the sterility (biological and emotional) of his real marriage, to a white woman. And unlike Steve’s metamorphosis, which can be read as a comeuppance for his political agnosticism, David’s offers a way to redress the past: years earlier, he had an affair with a mixed-race woman that ended when, from lack of courage — such unions were illegal under apartheid — he refused to run off with her.

Rounding out the threesome is Derek, a pianist and philanderer who becomes enamored of a famous soprano, despite her grim track record in romance — one of her lovers committed suicide, while another was found drowned, possibly strangled. She agrees to take him on as her accompanist but extracts a promise that he will never attempt to seduce her, warning that she has been “consorting with ghosts” since she was a child on her family’s remote farm.

Sex is a crucible for each of these men, exposing unpleasant truths about who they really are. David is well meaning but weak; he worries that it’s exploitative to sleep with the beautiful stranger who believes she’s his wife, but does it nevertheless. The soprano reprimands Derek for frittering away his talent, spending too much time pursuing women, but he’s still hellbent on making her his next conquest. And in the book’s most disturbing scene, Steve, stung by barbs — real or imagined — directed at his newly black self, takes out his anger in a violent encounter with his children’s German nanny, an archetypal blue-eyed blonde who makes the mistake of saying flirtatiously: “Your skin. I like how it feel, how it look.” Brink is walking a fine line here: this is virtually “Birth of a Nation” material, dredging up white fears of the powerful black male. The most charitable gloss is that it’s an intentional caricature, an indictment of how whites persist in perceiving racial difference.

Certainly it’s brave of Brink to tangle with these issues, which have grown murkier in the new age of ostensible freedom. But his cause isn’t helped by plodding prose — the voices of all three narrators are numbingly similar, prone to bald, banal statements like “I want to know what it means to be me” — and he overloads his narratives with clichéd horror-story accouterments. David lives on the 13th floor — in Apt. 1313, no less — of a monolithic apartment complex (designed by Steve) that was built over the unmarked graves of slaves and is haunted by an Ancient Mariner type who claims to have been waiting there some 300 years.

The symbolism is likewise heavy-handed and enervating, shucking the characters of life. Still, Brink’s portrait of a contemporary South Africa mobbed by unappeased ghosts has a disquieting resonance as a meditation on how the past continues to infiltrate the present. At one point, David gazes out at the harbor and glimpses Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, “now almost irrelevant, canonized by history, no longer a defining presence, unless one chooses to remember.” “What is past is past,” he declares. “Or isn’t it?”

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Trade Paper Specfications

• Length: 8.00 in
• Width: 5.25 in
• Height: 0.00 in
• Weight: 17.00 oz
• Page Count: 320 pages