The Rights of Desire: Amazon.fr: Andre Brink: Livres anglais et �trangers

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EUR 6,76

Reli�

Reli�, avril 2001

Broch�

EUR 11,47

Descriptions du produit

Amazon.co.uk

Andre Brink's The Rights of Desire concerns a retired librarian's infatuation with his young lodger. Ruben Olivier, as the ageing lecher, is resolutely unsympathetic. He pathetically spends weeks sifting through the dust in his basement because the beloved's navel ring has fallen through a crack in the floorboards. When Tessa, the lodger brings home a black man, Zolani, he nearly has a heart attack, musing after he has recovered his breath: "It was unworthy and I knew it. Yet how could I not wonder about it?--Zolani is welcomed into her bed but I am still denied ... her exasperating and prodigal beauty, distributed like alms among the poor. Only I remained denied." His relationship to literature and music is similarly self-aggrandizing and precious: "I went to Spain with Don Quixote--I still go every year in the summer--and to St Petersburg with Dostoevsky every winter. In between, I go to Paris with Balzac, or with Zola if I feel up to it." It is as difficult to like Tessa, who, in addition to being a little bit slutty and nutty is also a compulsive liar.

Cluttered around their doomed but mutually sustaining love affair is the atrocious exhibition of the white post-apartheid narration of the suburbs. Olivier's best friend is brutally murdered and failing to recognise the crumpled pile of rags on the side of the road Olivier drives by. Tessa narrowly escapes being gang raped in the Newlands forest. The novel equivocates between claiming that all this sex and violence is a function of contemporary social collapse or may simply be an expression of the timeless beauty and violence of Cape Town. Woven into the story of Ruben and Tessa is the story of Antje of Bengal, a 17th-century slave girl, whose ghost haunts the house and the story of Magrieta, Olivier's housekeeper, who is forced to flee her home after an episode of township violence. At times over-ripe, this novel is at it most compelling in its characterisation of this pair. --Neville Hoad --Ce texte fait r�f�rence � l�dition Reli� .

From Publishers Weekly

A December/May romance (ardent on the December side, platonic-but-teasing on the May side) blooms against the backdrop of postapartheid South Africa in Brink's latest offering. Librarian Ruben Olivier, the 65-year-old narrator, was forced into early retirement in Capetown to make way for a black replacement. Violence has personally touched Ruben: Johnny MacFarlane, his neighbor and close friend, was recently murdered. His grown-up children want him to leave the country for his safety; to appease them, Ruben sublets part of his house to 29-year-old Tessa Butler, who is beautiful, untrustworthy, confiding and promiscuous. Also present in Ruben's household are two other women: Magrieta Daniels, Ruben's housekeeper, and Antje of Bengal, a ghost. Magrieta has an implacable sixth sense for the house's odors and order; Ruben can hide nothing from her. Furthermore, Magrieta is on good terms with Antje, who was the slave, lover and accomplice in the murder of her 18th-century owner, Willem Mostert. Brink (A Dry White Season, etc.) has a wonderful time delineating Ruben's character from his veldt childhood to his discovery of "the deeply satisfying sublimation of travelling through the pages of books" and his unsatisfying marriage. Tessa, on the other hand, remains a stereotypical sex object. A subplot involving Magrieta's neighborhood, from which she is forced to flee when she is accused by a neighborhood gang of being an "impimpi," or police informer, edges the central romance with an ominous hint of violence. Although this isn't Brink's best effort, he remains a consummately professional storyteller, and the voice of his narrator, with its subtle wit and vulnerability, is a welcome one.

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D�tails sur le produit

Reli�: 320 pages
Editeur�: Harcourt (avril 2001)
Langue : Anglais
ISBN-10: 0151006547
ISBN-13: 978-0151006540

Moyenne des commentaires client�: 5.0 �toiles sur 5 Voir tous les commentaires (1 commentaire client)

Classement des meilleures ventes d'Amazon: 413.622 en Livres anglais et �trangers (Voir les 100 premiers en Livres anglais et �trangers)

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True Brink! 12 f�vrier 2005

Par "readnadal"

Format:Broch�

Classic Brink intrigue - easy reading. 'Traditional values' and social expectation questioned as only Brink knows how. Captivating, difficult to put down. A must read for those unafraid to question society and its do's and dont's.

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