| A Chain of Voices Contributor(s): Brink, Andre (Author) |
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ISBN: 1402208650 ISBN-13: 9781402208652 Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark OUR PRICE: $17.99 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: September 2007 Annotation: Cruelty and passion are evoked in this luminous story of a slave rebellion set in a remote part of South Africa in 1825. At its heart is the confrontation between two men: one white, the other black; one master, the other a slave; two brothers joined as friends and torn asunder as adults in their tragic struggle for freedom. Based on the actual slave revolt and published simultaneously in Afrikaans and English, A Chain of Voices spans three generations of the living and the dead. ?The story?will inevitably evoke comparisons with William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, a work to which it is substantially superior in insight and artistry.? -Julian Moynahan, New York Times Book Review ?A Chain of Voices is the truest and most provocative study of existential rebellion since the publication in 1951 of Camus's seminal work, The Rebel. Like Camus, Brink reminds us that no matter the human condition, there remains within an indomitable spark bursting to be free, a spirit which may in the end be able to abide physical slavery but never mental imprisonment.? -News and Observer??Raleigh ?Brink is a good storyteller, adept at the selection and building of detail and the pacing of a momentum which sweeps the reader to its climax.? -Sunday Tribune ?A Chain of Voices is a broadside of a book?It has much to say about the universality of oppression and the equally ubiquitous striving for freedom.? -Worldview |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | African American - Historical - Fiction | Literary |
| Dewey: FIC |
| LCCN: 2007020230 |
| Physical Information: 1.3" H x 6" W x 8.9" (1.50 lbs) 512 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Spanning three generations and narrated in the voices of both the living and the dead, A Chain of Voices is reminiscent of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom ; it is a beautiful and haunting illustration of racism's plague on South Africa. On a farm near the Cape Colony in the early nineteenth century, a slave rebellion kills three and leaves eleven others condemned to death. The rebellion's leader, Galant, was raised alongside the boys who would become his masters. His first victim, Nicholas van der Merwe, might have been his brother. As the many layers of Andre Brink's novel unfold, it becomes clear that the violent uprising is as much a culmination of family tensions as it is an outcry against the oppression of slavery. |
Contributor Bio(s): Brink, Andre: - Thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature and twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, ANDRÉ BRINK is one of South Africa's eminent novelists. He is the author of over 20 works of fiction, many of them written during the years when apartheid dominated the culture of his country. His first openly political novel, Kennis van die Aand became a cause célèbre. It was banned a year after its publication under new censorship laws applied for the first time to an Afrikaans writer. Brink later translated the work into English as Looking on Darkness. A prolific literary critic and dramatist, Brink has worked for over 40 years as an academic and as a translator of works as varied as Mary Poppins and Shakespeare's plays into Afrikaans. André Brink is an outspoken recorder of South Africa's turbulent history from the days of apartheid to the present. |