by André Brink
(Sourcebooks)
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 myth ography, 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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