A few weeks ago Nigel Beale interviewed André in our home in Cape Town.
I met Andre Brink recently at his home in Cape Town. (His lovely young wife Karina greeted me at the door and led me into his book-lined study. Before entering the house however, I encountered this in the garden:) [photo left]. Once seated we talked mostly about his life, about his father, about love and duty, justice, Apartheid, inter-racial sex, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer; his love affair with poet Ingrid Jonker, her suicide, her poem ‘Plant me a Tree,’ English as his second language, Picasso, recommended wines and staying in South Africa, despite his nephew having been shot dead by intruders last year at his home just north of Johannesburg.
To listen to the audio interview click here.
The following statement has been issued by the wRite accociates on 7 March 2007 and signed by the following 81 people, André and I among them:
STATEMENT IN RESPONSE TO RECENT EVENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF THE FREE STATE
It is not enough to deplore privately the disgraceful act perpetrated by certain students at the University of the Free State against fellow South Africans employed to serve as cleaners at that institution.
The facts must be faced publicly in all their crudity.
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Last Monday, 19 November, André gave a short guest lecture at the University of Salzburg, Austria:
“Writers in Context during Apartheid: Nadine Gordimer and André Brink”
The lecture was followed by André’s introduction to the film A Dry White Season (1989) based on his novel by the same title (1979).
In his book on Africa, Bartholomäus Grill wrote that sometimes literature can provide a small gap through which we can glimpse the invisible world of the continent (Ach, Afrika: Berichte aus dem Inneren des Kontinents, 2003).
This year, André’s British publisher Harvill Secker published Karen Connelly’s debut novel The Lizard Cage which opens a gap through which we can glimpse life in Burma between 1988 and 1995, the time between the anti-government riots in which hundreds of Burmese people lost their lives and the occasion when Aung San Suu Kyi was released from prison (even if only for a short period of time).
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The Blue Door was originally published in a not-for-sale edition by Umuzi on the occasion of its official launch in March 2006. Now, Harvill Secker has officially released the for-sale edition of this fascinating book which forms the first part of an upcoming novel in three parts, soon to be published by Human & Rousseau in Afrikaans.
Nadine Gordimer mentioned The Blue Door last year in The Sunday Independent as one of her choices for ‘great festive reading’ (24 December 2006, p. 16):
“…another example of Brink’s use of the writer’s imperative: to find the right ‘voice’ – mode – for a particular theme. This novel is a delicately beautiful exploration of the confusion in human relations: what lies, unrealised, behind the door of an individual’s conception of self.”
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