André Brink's novel Other Lives, subtitled A Novel in Three Parts, is contaminated by prevarication and nebulosity. The genre of this book is somewhere between a collection of short stories and a full-fledged novel, tracing it in a liminal textual space. Brink's gesture of obscuring generic conventions and disturbing hopes for development and closure gives the novel the power of disruption and transgression. More than an artistic choice, the fragmented interpretation of post-apartheid South Africa and the confusing worlds presented in the novel replicate the writer's struggle with an elusive reality: a nation still searching for social and political stability. With a loose knot interconnected, the three parts of the novel are immersed in the realism and social reality of South Africa. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay André Brink's latest trilogy of short stories, Other Lives, first published in Afrikaans in 2008. Since the end of apartheid, his work has swung towards mythography, and with Other Lives, set in current Cape Town, infiltrates magical realism and fantasy. In itself, this would be a positive development, but he doesn't use them to explore new themes, but rather locks himself into another genre that knocks on the same doors of racial and gender division. This book is advertised as “a novel in three parts,” but it would be more accurate to call Other Lives an anthology of disturbing tales, tied together by themes and characters but in desperate need of an overall design. , The Blue Door, which stars David, a non-professional painter who hides from his wife Lydia in a not-so-secret studio in Green Point. One afternoon David goes to Giovanni's delicatessen to pick up supplies. When he returns to the blue door of the study, he is embedded by a woman, "dark-skinned", whom he has never met, but who is by all accounts his wife and the mother of his two children. Despite having no idea what's happening to him, David physically follows her and a cringe-worthy sex scene ensues. An attempt to find his "real" wife, Lydia, in their Claremont apartment becomes an Escher nightmare that keeps David trapped in a dead-end building. He and Lydia are destined to amuse the building's architect and his wife, Steve and Carla, that evening, and here begins the first broadcast between the short stories: Steve is the central character of the next story. Here also begins one of the reasons why this book falls short. Brink introduces sarcasm, randomness, and a thought-provoking element of psychopathy throughout the short stories. A verse from The Blue Door, part of David's retorts about his catastrophe to make up for a previous adulterous situation with "a meid", as his then-wife refers to it. for her, she aptly describes the book's predicament: “I had taken a step, but not far enough. I had never gotten to the 'other side' of whatever it might be.” Mirror, the second novella in the series, is the most frustrating of the three. In a bizarre event that causes white designer Steve to wake up black one morning, Steve undergoes a transformation apparently imagined as a caricature, but the opportunity to smile never presents itself. No one except a barge, and his children's German au pair, seems to notice that Steve is now a black man and the transformation seems to be mostly on his mind. No misbehavior so far. But Steve didn't go black for a day before he burst into rage, as if he'd been mistreated his whole life, sexually attacking the au pair after sheshe told him: “Your skin. I like how it feels, how it looks.” “If this is what you're looking for, this is what you'll get. Fucking little white bitch,” Steve thinks to himself. In a section that probably shouldn't be reprinted here, Brink offers the deadly habit of stereotyping, insulting blacks, Germans, and women in one fell swoop. The black man is a violent rapist; the German au pair has a thing for black men, and actually enjoys it, reviving the myth of black men as marauders and women as malevolent scavengers. Well, that evening, Steve and his wife Carla (who is also apparently a dissatisfied nymphomaniac) waiting to target like-minded men), are dining out when the restaurant is overtaken by armed robbers and the diners are locked up in a warehouse. Carla apparently, for the first time, notices that her husband is black and implores him to reason with the bandits: “You're one of them. If there's anyone here who can listen, it's you." Also at the restaurant that evening are the melodiously and sexually exasperated Derek and the object of his desire, the soprano Nina, who has so damaged her previous lovers that she now rejects any of them. This provides the link to the final narrative: Passionate. Steeped in ostentatious concepts of art, music and wine, Appassionata is an overloaded cliché that eccentricizes sex but thankfully gives racial scrutiny pause. Despite Nina's warning that he has "consorted with ghosts", Derek is eager to lust after her and this brings the deduction to a climax in a very unusual way. Other Lives is a porridge full of lumps: too much starch and no milk, sugar or butter. You can eat it eventually but it is likely to give you a stomach ache. It brings voices through the narrative of blacks and refers to kinship, especially sensory ones, to reveal the racial practices of the past apartheid system as a policy of segregation and political and economic discrimination against whites. He used to create erogenous scenes between whites and blacks of both sexes. The novel Other Lives deals with sexuality, it also represents an archetype of racial, colonial and political relations between whites and blacks. And the injustices of whites against blacks. Oppression of blacks is also a major issue. To represent the story when writing, Brink chose to write the story as fiction. In this novel he opts for fiction to rewrite the history of South Africa and describe the facts. He exposes the remnants of the post-apartheid system through an innovative style, skillfully inserting different episodes, including real or even personal sexual relationships, incorporating and taking up the consequences of the colonial experience. At first reading, some erotic acts of the period The novels give the impression of being scenes of pure passion, but then they reveal themselves as meager desires for annihilation. For example, in the second part Mirror, when Steve, a black man, is irritated by the expressions of the seductive young white woman named Silke who tells him "your skin, I really like the way it feels, the way it looks", he becomes exasperated. since he regards his words as a racial Remarque that echoes past memories of racial slurs he heard earlier in the novel such as "your mother's black cunt". Consequently his reaction can be described as an attempt to release the control of his anger and take revenge on the white race exemplified in Silke by engaging in violent sexual intercourse saying that “for the first time I become aware of what is happening inside me. Not passion, not lust, not ecstasy, but anger. A terrible and destructive anger." Here we can discover racism deeply rooted in social institutions. Throughout Brink's novels, he explores thesexual relations between whites and blacks and portrays them as natural sexual partners who could be natural political and social partners if only the Afrikaner establishment would allow it. In the first part of The Blue Door the love relationship between a white man and a black woman, David Le Roux and Embeth, is perfectly illustrated by the example of what, even after the apartheid regime, is still well conceived as a taboo kinship, completely forbidden by David's family. Here we discover racial segregation and discrimination between whites and blacks. The end of the apartheid regime in 1994 and the subsequent democratic elections were two crucial moments that marked the modern history of South Africa. The ecstasy of the beginning, however, was soon overshadowed by disillusionment and doubt. Apartheid is not just a strategy of racial segregation; it is also an entire cultural heritage. Its fall has placed the country in a liminal situation, with two opposing forces: while the old principle struggles to survive, the new order strives to come to life. This state of interval predicted in Nadine Gormider's July's People (1980), published more than three decades ago, still seems to be installed in South Africa. “The old dies and the new cannot be born” by Antonio Gramsci; in this interregnum a great diversity of morbid symptoms arises,” used as an epigraph to Gordimer's novel, is captured in Brink's Other Lives (2010), published after thirty years. Brink's novel also tells of a confusing reality in which the past penetrates the present. However, André Brink's novel Other Lives raises an even more relevant question: is it really possible to break with the past? Brink himself provided an answer in one of his interviews long before the novel was published. The “dismantling” of apartheid, he says, “is likely to be a long process because, unfortunately, apartheid will not be easily forgotten.” Other Lives by Brink, published in 2010, is deeply rooted in a present unable to separate its ties to a bleak past. The novel confronts the remnants of a distorted regime linked to oppression. It offers a counter-power narrative in which revisiting the intimidations of the past achieves a purgatorial effect. Here in this novel is Brink's concept of “offense” in relation to literature and his vision of literary texts as sexualized bodies that resist the reader's power of domestication. The sexuality used in the novel is a strategy to discover the immersion of political power in people's intimate lives. The narrative of the novel provides us with episodes of sexual violence and humiliation. Just as Brink's text provides an appropriate case for trauma studies in which literature has the function of writing about abuses of power. Brink describes slavery, sexual abuse, malpractices, and injustice towards those who have no voice. Brink highlights the messy power of the imaginative hold on reality and its ability to reconstruct both the past and the present. His passion for the bizarre in later novels and especially in Other Lives is in tune with his new aesthetic interpretation of a post-apartheid South Africa as he feels the need to construct and deconstruct new possibilities; activate the imagination in the exploration of those previously inaccessible silences; playing with the future on that point where it meets past and present. Brink's attempt to liberate resourcefulness and redefine reality as a strategy to dismantle the authority of the past also finds expression in another literary and artistic movement. It is no coincidence that the opening sentence of the first story of Other Lives strikes at the foundations of the scale between dream and reality: “There was, before, the dream”. The biblical modulation of the phrase gives hegemony to the dream. So it canread: in the beginning there was the dream. And it can be said that in all the characters' dreams Brink depicts reality. The opening story of Other Lives “Blue Door” is about David Leroux, a painter who, one afternoon, unexpectedly discovers that he has another family. Opening the blue door of his rented studio where he retreats to paint, he is greeted by two children who call him "daddy" and a beautiful young black wife named Sara who he has never seen before. His efforts to recover his former life are marred by failure as he is unable to find his home. The narrative ends with David returning to his study, which now has a yellow door. The second story, “Mirror,” has the same atmosphere of magical realism with Kafkaesque undertones. Steve, an architect, wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a black man. The bathroom mirror portrays a completely strange person. Stressed and restless, he enters a state of doubt about his identity and reality. Two vehement episodes reinforce his feeling of loss: the first, the rape of the blonde au pair and, the second, the hostile robbery in a restaurant. The story ends with the shattering of the mirror into pieces, announcing “a few years of doom.” The third and final story of Other Lives moves away from both magical realism and surrealism; rather it swings, especially towards the end, towards a gothic atmosphere. “Appassionata” tells of the strong obsession of Derek, a musician, for Nina Rousseau, a soprano. Nina is a woman with an enigmatic past, she refuses to have a sexual relationship with the enchanted Derek. The narrative ends with Nina transmuted into a femme fatale who kills Derek in a highly sensual and abstruse scene. Brink illustrates the sexualized relationship between his reader and the text in his novel's opening story, "The Blue Door." David's first sexual encounter with his newly discovered wife Sara reveals itself as a gesture of reading:And so we move through our unspoken, unspeakable text, following its rhythms and cadences, digressing along its possibilities, tending towards the one that it may be its conclusion but it continues to escape us, moving further and further away, just beyond our reach, as we writhe and gasp and moan and beg; but ultimately it is too remote to reach. This passage exemplifies Brink's aesthetic of the resistant text. Similar to David's metaphorical text, Other Lives is also “too remote to reach”. In another self-reflexive incident in the similar story, Sara describes Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart as a "strange book... very disturbing." It is exactly this effect of knowledge and disruption of DE that Brink's novel aims to create. The main objective of the text is to weaken hierarchies and distract from binary oppositions such as black/white, dream/reality and love/hate. In “The Blue Door” the boundaries between dream and reality are canceled as the opening sentence of the story reads: “First there was the dream”. David arrives in a dream space, in a similar world or another dimension that becomes his reality. The reader is correspondingly caught up in this misunderstanding as David reappears in the second story as Lydia's husband. In the third story, however, he once again gives the impression of being a painter married to Sara. “Mirror” also disappoints all efforts to achieve a comfortable understanding of the story. Steve, who wakes up one morning to find himself black, pollutes the reader with his doubts about whether he has always been black and acted white. The restaurant robbery episode further darkens the situation. Urging him to negotiate with the attackers, presumably black, his wife says: “you are one of them. If there's anyone here who can listen, it's you." The text endswithout concluding whether Steve is really black or white. However, Brink adds his concept of “offence” to the Barthesian vision of the erogenous relationship between a narrative and its recipient. “In the offensive act – he explains – we glimpse the possibility of freedom. As long as people can be offended by literature, the possibility remains that they can be awakened from sleep to learn to face their world in a new way." Brink's text offends on two levels: first, it outrages the reader's excitement to control meaning; and, secondly, challenge the silence by speaking openly about the forbidden and against oblivion. In the first story, "The Blue Door", David recalls an old relationship with a brunette girl named Embeth, whom he had hired as a model for his paintings. At that time he was engaged to a rich girl, Nelia. His first sexual encounter with the brown Embeth unfolds as an act of rebellion that defies legal, racial, and social prescriptions. David's statement “Embeth, I love you” is responded to by Embeth's “incredibly simple phrase: 'then fuck me', a clear insurrection of the Immorality Act. Such subversion attacks the linguistic purism of the legislator and destabilizes the regulation of the sexuality of South Africans by of the state authority. Their relationship quickly ends when David's girlfriend notices their illicit relationship, which she describes with a rhetorical question: “with a meid, David? David, with a meid?" - a question that sums up a history of racial and social discrimination. Since it is impossible to have a relationship without breaking the law, Embeth suggests that David leave the country together. David, however, proves too pusillanimous to jeopardize his comfortable life. The second story, narrated by Steve in “Mirror,” revisits how state power has meddled in the sexual lives of South Africans his legitimate sexual relationship with his white wife, despite knowing that the apartheid laws were overturned long ago. He recalls the story of his friend Martin during his student years. Martin “had a brief, clandestine fling with a dark girl. She was studying law with him. They were trapped by the police." transmutes into an illicit act. In “The Blue Door,” David remembers “with painful precision […] Nelia meeting us […] Her face as she stood in the doorway, staring at the two of us on the floor. No longer joined at the hips, but still naked." Nelia's verbal strength is associated with the strength of the police in the second story: I remember how she told me about the break-in into the little room. As the sheets were removed and as one of the men spread his open palm over the wet area at the bottom of the sheet. As one of the others ordered Martin to stand up to be photographed with his semitumescent penis. The way the girl - usually so sophisticated and reserved and intelligent - kept sobbing uncontrollably the whole time, as they pulled her arms and legs and stuck the back end of a flashlight into her vagina, and the things they said about her. Commenting on the violent intercession of the state in people's sexual lives, Steve says: "we all grew up with it, and we were affected by it." The fact that the two stories are remembered demonstrates a deeply hidden disturbance in the memory, consciousness and conscience of an entire nation. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a custom essayThe wound, being the etymology of the term trauma, again interposes itself in,.