ON THE CONTRARY - Softcover

André P. Brink

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0749397985 ISBN 13: 9780749397982

Publisher: VINTAGE, 1994

Synopsis

Estienne Barbier, born in the Loire Valley in 1699, lays claim to service in the armies of the kings of France and Prussia, but he is an inveterate liar, and the truth is less glorious: irate husbands have made the Lowlands too hot to hold him, and he has deserted his pregnant wife to stow away for the Cape of Good Hope.

An expedition to the hinterland opens his eyes to the majesty of the African landscape and its wondrous animals and he is enchanted by the rumour of a fabled city of gold. But he also begins to see clearly the sordid dealing that underlies the self-righteous pomposity of the East India Company. It is a vision that makes him powerful enemies. Taking cover on a remote farm, and energetically consoling sundry widows, Barbier finds himself, to his own surprise, fomenting rebellion.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

South African novelist Brink (Cape of Storms, 1992, etc.) again revisits the past to tell a picaresque tale that is also a heartfelt but clumsy mea culpa. Drawing on sources as varied as Cervantes and period histories, Brink appropriates the bare outlines of French-born Estienne Barbier's life and turns them into a tale weighted with symbolism and myth. The suggestion that Barbier was an ``eighteenth century Cape social bandit'' provides the political and moral heft for a character who otherwise is a liar, a shameless seducer, and self-seeking adventurer. Barbier, awaiting execution for fomenting rebellion and defying local officials, relates his life story in the form of a letter to Rosette, a slave he had helped escape from the Cape. Once the ill-treated property of the odious Allemann family, Rosette is also a mythic storyteller. With the spirit of Joan of Arc and a copy of Don Quixote as his trusty companions, Barbier offers contradictory reasons for his coming to the Cape, but he becomes more credible as he recounts run-ins with the local Dutch authorities, his seductions, and his growing sympathy for the indigenous peoples. Betrayed by friends, with a price on his head, he ventures into the interior searching for Rosette and for the legendary kingdom of Monomatapa, as well as a way to ``break the cycle of hate and vengeance.'' Many of the living and dead he meets forgive him, but others demand punishment. ``It is a terrible via dolorosa, yet I exult. This is my necessary purging on behalf of all of us who have invaded this space to subjugate it with our presumption and visit with our devastation.'' Ready now for death, Barbier remains an unlikely--and unconvincing--voice for reconciliation and contrition. Despite some brilliant moments, the novel is more a creakily schematic reworking of history than a persuasive illumination of South Africa's tangled past. Disappointing. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

South African novelist Brink (A Dry White Season ; An Act of Terror ) seems at first to be working a much lighter, more picaresque vein here than in his usual, more overtly political fiction. The narrator is a French-born soldier of fortune, Estienne Barbier, telling of his adventures in the South Africa run by the Dutch East India Company in the 18th century (there was such a person, though Brink wryly admits that most of his story is invented; still, he adds, "One never knows"). Barbier, sentenced to death for aiding a slave girl's escape and trying to foment a revolt in Capetown, awaits execution. He spins tall tales of his adventures in the scarcely known (to Europeans) continent, and it soon becomes apparent that, like the Don Quixote he constantly evokes, many of his exploits are of the imaginary kind. Driven by a manic search for a legendary lost treasure and for a vanished slave girl, helped in moments of crisis by interior dialogues with the spirit of Joan of Arc, Barbier creates a remarkable picture of the Africa of his time, the marginal existence of the Dutch farmers, the corruption of the civic administration and the near-invisibility of the "hottentots" who then, as now, did most of the menial work. In the end, his search becomes one for justice, for himself as well as for the native inhabitants. The book can therefore be read both as an adventure yarn and as a salutary political fable. Coming as it does at a time of enormous change in South Africa, the latter is what lingers most powerfully.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: VINTAGE
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0749397985
• ISBN 13: 9780749397982
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 356