André Brink's novel, Other Lives, subtitled A novel in three parts, is contaminated by prevarication and fog. The genre of this book is somewhere between a collection of short stories and a full-fledged novel, it traces it in a liminal textual space. Brink's gesture of obscuring generic conventions and disrupting hopes of development and closure gives the novel the power of disruption and transgression. More than an artistic choice, the uneven interpretation of post-apartheid South Africa and the blurred worlds presented in the novel reproduce the writer's struggle with a slippery reality: a nation still seeking its path to stability social and political. With a loose knot tied together, 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 should not be banned"?Get the original essayAndré Brink's latest short story trilogy, Other Lives, first published in Afrikaans in 2008. Since Expiration From apartheid, his work fluctuated towards mythography, and with Other Lives, set in present-day Cape Town, he infiltrates magical realism and fantasy. In itself, this would be a welcome development, but it doesn't use them to explore new themes, but rather locks itself into another genre knocking on the same doors of racial and gender division. This book is billed as "a novel in three parts," but it would be more accurate to call Other Lives an anthology of strange tales, linked by themes and characters but in dire need of an overall design. , The Blue Door, which features 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 some supplies. When he returns to the blue door of the studio, he is incorporated by a “dark complexion” woman, whom he has never met, but who is obviously his wife and the mother of his two children. Although he has no idea what is happening to her, David physically follows her and a proper sex scene ensues. An attempt to find his "real" wife, Lydia, in their Claremont apartment turns into Escher's nightmare that traps David in a dead-end building. He and Lydia are intended to entertain the building's architect and his wife, Steve and Carla, that evening, and it is here that the first transmission between the news stories begins: Steve is the central character of the following story. Here also begins one of the reasons why this book fails. Brink introduces sarcasm, chance and an exciting element of psychopathy into all the short stories. A line from The Blue Door, part of David's lines about his disaster to repair a previous adulterous situation with "a meid", as his then-wife refers to it. for her, aptly describes the book's predicament: “I had taken a step, but not far enough. I had never gotten to the “other side” of anything. Mirror, the second story in the series, is the most frustrating of the three. In a bizarre situation that causes white designer Steve to wake up black one morning, Steve undergoes a transformation seemingly considered a caricature, but the opportunity to smile never presents itself. No one, other than a houseboat and his children's German au pair, seems to notice that Steve is now a black man and the transformation seems to be mostly in his mind. No misbehavior so far. But Steve hadn't been dark for a day before he burned with anger, as if he hadbeen abused his entire life, sexually assaulting the au pair after she told him, “Your skin. I like what it feels like, what it looks like.” “If that’s what you’re looking for, that’s what you’re going to get.” Fucking little white slut,” Steve thought to himself. In a section that probably shouldn't be reprinted here, Brink maintains the deadly habit of stereotyping, insulting black men, Germans, and women in one fell swoop. The black man is a violent rapist; the German au pair has a penchant for black men and actually enjoys the trial, reviving the myth of black men as marauders and women as malevolent purgers. During that evening, Steve and his wife, Carla (who is also apparently an unsatisfied nymphomaniac waiting to target like-minded men), are dining at a restaurant when the restaurant is overrun by armed robbers and the diners are locked in a cellar. Apparently, Carla, for the first time, notices that her husband is black and begs him to reason with the bandits: “You are one of them. If there’s anyone here they can listen to, it’s you.” Also at the restaurant that evening is the melodiously and sexually exasperated Derek and the object of his desire, the soprano Nina, who has so damaged her former lovers that she now refuses them. This provides the link to the final story: Appassionata. Steeped in ostentatious conceits about art, music, and wine, Appassionata is an overloaded cliché that eccentricizes sex but thankfully gives a break from racial inspection. Despite Nina's warning that she has been "dating ghosts", Derek is anxious with desire for her and this brings the deduction to a head in a most unusual way. Other Lives is a lumpy mush – too much starch and no milk, sugar or butter. Eventually, you can eat it, but it might give you a stomach ache. Brink speaks by relating black people and referring to kinship bonds, mainly sensory, 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 perform erogenous scenes between blacks and whites of both sexes. The novel Other Lives deals with sexuality, it also constitutes an archetype of racial, colonial and political relations between blacks and whites. And the injustices of white people towards black people. The oppression of black people is also one of the major issues. To depict the story throughout the writing, Brink chose to write the story as fiction. He opts for fiction in this novel to rewrite the history of South Africa and depicts the facts. He lays bare the vestiges of the post-apartheid system through an innovative style, skillfully inserting several incidents, including real and even personal sexual relations, integrating and repeating the after-effects of the colonial experience. On first reading, some of the erotic acts in the novels give the impression of being scenes of pure passion, but they are later revealed to be meager desires for annihilation. For example, in the second part of Mirror, when Steve, a black man, is annoyed by the words of the attractive young white woman named Silke who tells him "your skin, I really like the way it feels, the way it looks looks like,” he becomes exasperated. since he views his words as a racial remark that echoes past memories of racial slurs he heard earlier in the novel, such as "your mother's black pussy". Therefore, his reaction can be described as an attempt to release the brakes of his anger and take revenge on the white race exemplified by Silke, by carrying out violent sexual intercourse by saying that "forthe first time, I become aware of what is happening inside me. Not passion, not lust, not ecstasy, but rage. A terrible and destructive rage.” Here we discover a racism deeply rooted in social institutions. In all of Brink's novels, he goes through sexual relationships between blacks and whites and describes 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 romantic relationship between a white man and a black woman, David Le Roux and Embeth, is perfectly illustrated by the example of the romantic relationship which, even after the apartheid regime, is still well thought of as a taboo relationship, totally rejected by David's family. Here we learn about racial segregation and discrimination between whites and blacks. The expiration of the apartheid regime in 1994 and the democratic elections that followed were two pivotal moments in South Africa's modern history. But the ecstasy of the beginnings was soon overshadowed by disillusionment and doubt. Apartheid is not only a strategy of racial segregation; it is also a whole 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 struggles to come to life. This state of interval predicted in July's People (1980) by Nadine Gormider, published more than thirty years ago, seems to still be relevant in South Africa. Antonio Gramsci: “The old dies and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms,” 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 blurred reality in which the past penetrates the present. However, the novel Other Lives by André Brink 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 well before the novel's publication. The “dismantling” of apartheid, he says, “threatens to be a long-term process because, unfortunately, apartheid will not be easily forgotten.” Brink's Other Lives, published in 2010, is deeply rooted in a present unable to separate its ties to a dark past. The novel fights against the residue of a distorted regime rooted in oppression. It offers a narrative of counter-power in which revisiting the intimidation of the past achieves a cathartic effect. Here, in this novel, Brink's concept of "offense" linked to literature and his view of literary texts as sexualized bodies resisting the reader's power to tame. The sexuality used in the novel is a strategy aimed at revealing the immersion of political power in people's intimate lives. The novel's narrative offers us episodes of sexual violence and humiliation. Likewise, Brink's text provides an appropriate case for trauma studies, in which literature functions to write about abuses of power. Brink depicts slavery, sexual abuse, embezzlement and injustice with what is left unsaid. Brink highlights the messy power of the imaginative grip on reality and its capacity to reconstruct both the past and the present. His penchant for the bizarre in later novels and particularly in Other Lives fits 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 its exploration of these previously inaccessible silences; playing with the future on this needle where it meets the past and the present. The attempt toBrink's aim of unleashing ingenuity and redefining 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 Autres vies touches on the foundations of the scale between dream and reality: “First there was the dream”. The biblical modulation of the phrase gives hegemony to the dream. We can therefore read: at the beginning there was the dream. And it can be said that throughout the characters' dreams, Brink depicts reality. The opening story of Other Lives “Blue Door” tells the story of David Leroux, a painter who, one afternoon, unexpectedly discovers that he has another family. Opening the blue door to his rented studio where he retires to paint, he is greeted by two children who call him "daddy" and a beautiful young colored wife named Sara whom he has never seen before. His efforts to reclaim his previous life are doomed to failure as he is unable to find his home. The story ends with David returning to his studio, 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 and finds himself transformed into a black man. The bathroom mirror depicts a completely bizarre person. Stressed and agitated, he enters a state of doubt about his identity and his reality. Two vehement episodes reinforce his sense of loss: first the rape of the blonde au pair and, then, the hostile robbery in a restaurant. The story ends with the mirror being destroyed into pieces, heralding “a few years of misfortune.” The third and final story of Other Lives departs from both magical realism and surrealism; it rather oscillates, especially towards the end, towards a gothic atmosphere. “Appassionata” recounts the strong obsession of Derek, musician, for Nina Rousseau, soprano. Nina is a woman with an enigmatic past who refuses to have a sexual relationship with the charmed Derek. The story ends with Nina transformed into a femme fatale killing Derek in a very sensual and abstruse scene. Brink illustrates the sexualized relationship between her reader and the text in the opening story of her novel, “The Blue Door.” David's first sexual encounter with his newly discovered wife Sara reveals itself as a reading gesture: And so we move through our unspoken and unspeakable text, following its rhythms and cadences, meandering along its possibilities, reaching out towards what could be its conclusion but which continues. to escape, moving further and further away, just beyond our reach, as we writhe and pant and moan and beg; but it is ultimately too far away to be reached. This passage illustrates the aesthetics of the resistant text according to Brink. Similar to David's metaphorical text, Other Lives is also "too far away to reach." In another incident of introspection in a 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 ED that Brink's novel claims to create. The text's major effort is to undermine hierarchies and shift attention away from binary oppositions such as black/white, dream/reality, and love/hate. In “The Blue Door”, the boundaries between dream and reality are erased since the first sentence of the story says: “First there was the dream”. David arrives in a dream space, a similar world or another dimension which becomes his reality. The reader is consequently involved in this misunderstanding since David reappears in the second story as Lydia's husband. In the third floor, however, it again gives the impression of being apainter married to Sara. “Mirror” also disappoints every effort to achieve a comfortable understanding of the story. Steve, who wakes up one morning and finds himself black, pollutes the reader with his doubts about whether he has always been black and acted white. The episode of the robbery at the restaurant obscures the situation even further. Urging him to negotiate with the attackers, supposedly black men, his wife responds: “You are one of them. If there’s anyone here they can listen to, it’s you.” The text ends without concluding whether Steve is truly white or black. However, Brink adds to Barthes's vision of the erogenous relationship between a story and its receiver his own concept of “offense”. “In the act of offense,” he explains, “we glimpse the possibility of freedom. As long as people can be offended by literature, there remains a chance that they will be awakened from their slumber to learn to face their world again. » Brink's text offends on two levels: first, it outrages the reader's enthusiasm for controlling meaning; and, secondly, he challenges silence by speaking openly about the forbidden and against forgetting. In the first story, "The Blue Door", David recalls an old affair with a dark-haired girl called Embeth, whom he had hired as a model for his paintings. At that time, he was engaged to a rich girl, Nélia. His first sexual encounter with the dark-haired Embeth takes place as a rebellious act defying statutory, racial and social prescriptions. David's statement "Embeth, I love you" responds "in a shockingly direct manner: 'so fuck me,'" a clear insurrection of the law of immorality. Such subversion attacks the linguistic purism of the legislator and destabilizes the regulation of the sexuality of South Africans by state authorities. Their relationship quickly ends when David's fiancée notices their illegal affair, which she describes in a rhetorical question: "with a meid, David?" David, with a meid? - a question that encapsulates 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 endanger his comfortable life. The second story, told by Steve in “Mirror,” looks at how state power has intruded into the sex lives of South Africans. Upon waking up and discovering that he is a black man, Steve begins to become suspicious of his legitimate sexual relationship with his white wife, even though he knows that the laws of apartheid have long been overturned. He remembers the story of his friend Martin during his student years. Martin “had a brief, surreptitious affair with a dark-haired girl. She studied law with him. They were trapped by the police.” David's story in "The Blue Door" interconnects with that of Steve's friend when he is caught in the act when the sexual act turns into a wrongdoing. In “The Blue Door,” David remembers “with painful precision […] Nelia surprised us […] Her face as she stood in the doorway, looking down at the two of us. No longer joined at the hip, but still naked.” Nélia's verbal force is associated with police force in the second story: I remember how he told me about the burst into the small room. How the sheets were removed from it and how one of the men spread his open palm over the wet area at the bottom of the sheet. How one of the others ordered Martin to stand up so he could be photographed with his half-tumescent penis. How the girl – usually so sophisticated, self-sufficient and intelligent – ​​continued to sob uncontrollably, while they,.