Customer Reviews

Other Lives

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A year or so ago I learned for the first time about the South African novelist Andre Brink, who has been nominated for the Nobel Prize three times and is most noted for writing about race and race relations. I then bought his most recent work of fiction, OTHER LIVES. Brink bills it as "a novel in three parts." It might also be described as three novellas that are interrelated by overlapping characters and events. I read the book a week ago at the beginning of a summer vacation trip and have been reflecting on it since. It certainly is arresting and it may even prove to be memorable in a perverse way, but, having now reflected on it for a week, I conclude it also is unsatisfactory.

All three novellas are set in contemporary Cape Town, and all three are narrated in the first person by relatively successful, artistic, middle-aged men. In the first, David, who is white and has been happily married for nine years to a white woman, suddenly discovers that he has entered an alternative universe in which he is married to a dark woman and has two dark children. In the second, Steve looks in the mirror one morning and sees that his skin color, formerly white, is now black, and he spends the rest of the day wondering whether and how that will affect his interactions with business associates and his (white) au pair, children, and wife. In the third, Derek, a concert pianist and Lothario, pursues Nina, a soprano and femme fatale (in both senses).

As can be gleaned from the above summary, OTHER LIVES is predicated on several radical breaks with reality, and with realism. Thus, the three novellas are also three fables. While the conceits permit Brink to raise and explore intriguing issues of race and personal identity, so far as I can tell (even after a week's consideration), he does not suggest any answers, leaving me feeling dissatisfied and manipulated. Moreover, none of the characters is particularly likeable. The three male narrators, as well as their various women, all are too hip, too materialistic, too smug, and too career-oriented. For those who care, there is plenty of sex, much of which is animalistic, at times savage, in nature. Finally, the writing is not distinguished. Strange to say about a book from a 70+-year-old Nobel Prize contender, OTHER LIVES strikes me as somewhat sophomoric, debased, and shallow.