Customer Reviews

An Instant in the Wind

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What is it that makes South African authors incapable of happy endings?

Having read and enjoyed JM Coetzee's bleak "Disgrace" I found Brink's novel in a second hand shop and went to work. In subject matter it is a blending of two Patrick White novels - "Voss" about a doomed journey to the (Australian) interior, and "A Fringe of Leaves" about a white woman's life among Aborigines after a 19th Century shipwreck.

In Brink's hands, in 1750, a naive but spirited white woman from the Cape accompanies her Swedish explorer husband into the upmapped interior, only to find herself alone when the husband dies and the Hottentot retainers head for the hills.

She is found by a runaway slave, Adam, who for reasons of his own agrees to set off with her to the Cape.

Brink vividly describes the country through which they must travel. Against its physical presence, the couple become lovers. All of this is good fun. Brink was writing at a time when black/white relationships were forbidden under apartheid law. Indeed, the book for a while was banned. He delivers us a vintage love story, full of sex and spirit. (Funny how Coetzee, 25 years later when inter-racial sex is no longer verboten, sees the politics of such relationships in an entirely different way).

As Brink signals in the opening pages, however, there is no happy-ever-after. If there had been (the story purports to be based on truth), South Africa's history might have been different.

At times, the writing has less to do with black and white than purple, especially as Brink creates a seaside idyll for his pair, but for my money it's a grand read. It recalls a time when white South African liberals believed if only people could see their true nature everything would be all right.

Coetzee's darker - and more recent - version is that WHEN people are most true to their nature, South Africans have much to fear.

A wonderful read. A powerfully written love story between a slave and a white woman in 18th century South Africa. The South African landscape is revealed in all it's harshness and beauty. The story of the two characters are based on fact which makes the story even more phenomenal. A masterpiece.

I expected this novel to be engaging not only because it was by Andre Brink, one of the most celebrated South African writers, but because it was also shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize. However, I was deeply disappointed with this chronicle of the relationship between a white woman and a runaway slave because it becomes, almost right from the beginning, cliched, repetitive, and affected.

'An instant in the wind' is a novel of exploration at two levels. On the one hand, it explores the beautifully cruel South African landscape between the Great Fish River and Table Mountain, passing through the Tsitsikama region and the Karoo Desert; on the other, it intends to explore the psychology between blacks and whites and men and women in the South Africa of the mid-1700s--and, by extension, of 'apartheid' South Africa. Brink's thesis appears (and I emphasize that word, appears) to be that only extreme situtations bring people together, making us forget our racial and sexual differences. However, nothing really illuminating is said, and the very ending is extremely ambiguous, causing one to wonder if Brink did't play a trick on the reader with respect to the intentions of the female character. If he did (and I'm inclined to believe that he did), then the ultimate message of the novel is extremely nihilistic.

Is there anything redeeming in this novel? I found the descriptions of nature superb. The Tsitsikama and Karoo truly come to life the way Brink describes them, and Table Mountain becomes truly magnificent. This background, perhaps, makes the novel worth reading.

This is an historical book based on fact but
embroidered and enlarged. It's written by a very well-known South African author, and this book is 'unput-downable'.
I have read it a few times, and I keep buying
it to give to friends as gifts, as I have just
done again this week via Amazon.

It's been a while since I've read authors from the country of my birth and soul, and yet it was only "an instant in the wind" ago.

Mr Brink does not disappoint - not even for a syllable - in his ability to capture what was and still is the very essence of a landscape and a people that need more than anything to unite the wonder that is South Africa, but struggle past the culture and heritage of different familiars and tradition on a continent that will never be tamed; one that is full of the unsurpassed splendour of the creator and the bitter heartache that is nature in her limitless beauty.

As the story unfolds we see the struggle and subversive questioning of the status quo by an intelligent young white woman conceived and raised in the manner fitting of a typically patriarchal, old country society of penal privilege(and if i may be so bold as to say penile privilege), and her ability to accept and allow for the thought that the opinion of a run-way coloured slave might also be right, even while they could not be more diametrically opposed in their personal histories and experience.

Their uniting factor is the inestimable will to question, to look for more than their allotment in life, to dare to live without compromise in a world that is harsh and unyielding to even the slightest flicker of courage.

As to why South African authors can't seem to find happy endings ... ours is a country that has seen too many generations of heartache, we've known happiness as but a fleeting gift, to be savoured for the time it exists, like namaqualand daisies carpeting a crude landscape for a short time, then to wilt away, remaining only in photographs and our hearts, until the next time ... one day, there will be happy endings to be shared, by our people and our writers.

This book may be set in a country and collective unfamiliar to many, but it's worth the investment to expand your horizons and discover in the end that geography is the only difference.
Buy it!

Instant in the Wind is one of the most beautiful love stories I have read. After an exploring team is killed in the jungle, a slave on the run is forced to accompany a surviving white woman and together they travel across the desert. During their long walk throughout the country, their relationship evolves. As they learn about each other, we discover all the details of life in South Africa in the 18th century. Brink's writing is at its most powerful, poetic, so moving in describing this heartbreaking love story. A masterpiece of literature.