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44th out of 656 books
—
502 voters
A Dry White Season
As startling and powerful as when first published more than two decades ago, Andre Brink's classic novel, A Dry White Season, is an unflinching and unforgettable look at racial intolerance, the human condition, and the heavy price of morality.
Ben Du Toit is a white schoolteacher in suburban Johannesburg in a dark time of intolerance and state-sanctioned apartheid. A simple...more
Ben Du Toit is a white schoolteacher in suburban Johannesburg in a dark time of intolerance and state-sanctioned apartheid. A simple...more
Paperback, 320 pages
Published
September 19th 2006
by Harper Perennial
(first published 1978)
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This is an adult coming-age-story. What do you do, as an adult, when you realize the world is not what you thought it was; that everything you based your life upon was a lie? That's what Ben Du Toit faces. He believed the govt of South Africa when they said that blacks lived separatly, but equally, and were benelovently cared for by the white govt and its people. He had never had reason to consider it. Suddenly events forced him to confront the truth and he faced a choice--he could look away and...more
I really like this novel, but at times find it mediocre. Brink is wonderful at conveying political commitments through dialog without usually relying on pedantry. I don't find the theme of a white man coming into consciousness about racism (in fucking apartheid South Africa, of all places) particularly compelling, but Brink is very good at exposing the endless bullshit of the liberal elite, a satisfying motif.
Otherwise this is a bit of a mystery-suspense, though we're made to understand from th...more
Otherwise this is a bit of a mystery-suspense, though we're made to understand from th...more
Jan 29, 2012
El
rated it
4 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
late20th-centurylit,
1001-books-list
Sometimes I love that I live under a rock. Because then I read things like this book, only to find out a movie was made of it starring Donald Sutherland, co-starring Susan Sarandon and Marlon Brando. Hello, Rock; I hope you're comfortable on top of me.
I sort of breezed through this book, which is totally the author's fault because it was just that good. I was invested the entire time. Ben Du Toit is a white schoolteacher in Johannesburg during the Apartheid. When a black friend comes to him for...more
I sort of breezed through this book, which is totally the author's fault because it was just that good. I was invested the entire time. Ben Du Toit is a white schoolteacher in Johannesburg during the Apartheid. When a black friend comes to him for...more
The Philippines also had its dry white season. A long dry white season, almost 14 years from the time the then President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972 up to the time he was deposed in a People Power revolution in 1986.
"it is a dry white season
dark leaves don't last, their brief lives dry out
and with a broken heart they dive down gently headed
for the earth.
not even bleeding.
it is a dry white season brother,
only the trees know the pain as they still stand erect
dry like steel, thei...more
"it is a dry white season
dark leaves don't last, their brief lives dry out
and with a broken heart they dive down gently headed
for the earth.
not even bleeding.
it is a dry white season brother,
only the trees know the pain as they still stand erect
dry like steel, thei...more
9 likes · like · see review
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Dans la moiteur des nuits orageuses de Pretoria, Ben Du Toit découvre un monde tout proche et pourtant si loin de sa vie d'Afrikaner.
Peu à peu, il ouvre des yeux incrédules sur un système qu'il cautionne par ignorance et par lâcheté et qui entretient une communauté, un peuple, dans le désespoir et la résignation.
La naïveté de Ben est telle qu'il croit encore à une justice où toute notion de couleur ou de race serait abolie, mais dans les années quatre-vingt en Afrique du Sud, l'espoir est un p...more
Peu à peu, il ouvre des yeux incrédules sur un système qu'il cautionne par ignorance et par lâcheté et qui entretient une communauté, un peuple, dans le désespoir et la résignation.
La naïveté de Ben est telle qu'il croit encore à une justice où toute notion de couleur ou de race serait abolie, mais dans les années quatre-vingt en Afrique du Sud, l'espoir est un p...more
Jan 25, 2013
Margitte
rated it
4 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
african-authors-afrikaans
André P Brink het die een na die ander protesboek geskryf tydens die Apartheidsjare waarvan hierdie een was. Om dit nou weer te lees is om in ongeloof te wonder hoe dit gebeur het dat hierdie inligting destyds amper as heiligskennis weerhou was van die Afrikaners. Die boek sluit net nog 'n deel van die verborge geskiedenis oop wat, toe dit die eerste keer in 1979 gepubliseer was, te oorweldigend was om behoorlik ge-absorbeer te kon word. Die boek het nie so opslae gemaak soos sy eerste boek "Ken...more
Ben Du Toit and the narrator are white South Africans living in Johannesburg. Ben is a school teacher. Gordon Ngubene is a black man who is the janitor at the school where Ben teaches. When Gordon's son Jonathan is missing after a series of riots, and then is reported dead, Gordon turns to Ben as he investigates to learn what happened to his son. No sooner does Gordon learn the truth about Jonathan, than Gordon is taken into police custody and "commits suicide" two weeks later. Ben can't believ...more
‘There are only two types of madness we should guard against. One is the belief that we can do everything. The other is the belief that we can do nothing.’
A Dry White Season is a sad, depressing look at racial prejudices in apartheid South Africa through the story of a white man trying to bring justice to the memory of a black man. Ben du Toit is a schoolteacher whose life changes when he becomes involved with the family of the school caretaker Gordon Ngubene. Set around the Soweto Riots the boo...more
A Dry White Season is a sad, depressing look at racial prejudices in apartheid South Africa through the story of a white man trying to bring justice to the memory of a black man. Ben du Toit is a schoolteacher whose life changes when he becomes involved with the family of the school caretaker Gordon Ngubene. Set around the Soweto Riots the boo...more
Ce livre m'a mise assez mal à l'aise... Bien sûr, on a entende parler de ce qui se passait en Afrique du Sud sous l'apartheid.
Le livre raconte comment Ben Du Toit, professeur blanc, voit sa vie chamboulée par la mort suspecte du balayeur noir de l'école où il travaille. Tous ses principes, ses croyances et ses idées reçues sont remis en question un à un.
Bien entendu, ça fait réfléchir, et je me rends compte que je ne sais pas trop comment la vie a changé là-bas depuis la fin de l'apartheid...
J'a...more
Le livre raconte comment Ben Du Toit, professeur blanc, voit sa vie chamboulée par la mort suspecte du balayeur noir de l'école où il travaille. Tous ses principes, ses croyances et ses idées reçues sont remis en question un à un.
Bien entendu, ça fait réfléchir, et je me rends compte que je ne sais pas trop comment la vie a changé là-bas depuis la fin de l'apartheid...
J'a...more
Although the story was good and a quick read, I didn't enjoy this book as much, probably because I was just coming off a Sigrid Undset high. The characters seemed flat to me. Of course, the author is showing a society, partially by introducing us to characters who at least start off as caricatures, and he's making a political and societal point more than anything else. The story is strong and will stay with me a long time. I never saw the movie, but I have my own ideas of Ben Du Toit and Melanie...more
Quelques réflexions intéressantes sur la folie, la vie en société, l'incompréhension entre les races, les choix qu'on doit faire, la conscience, etc...
On est tout de suite plongé dans l'histoire : bon sens du rythme.
On est tout de suite plongé dans l'histoire : bon sens du rythme.
I had a slow start with this book, I think because of the framing narrator, but Ben de Toit's story hooked me right in after 50 pages or so. The slow burn of his struggle for justice after the death of a black friend and colleague Gordon Ngubene in police custody is gut-wrenching and painful, but at the same time redemptive. Of all the books I have read recently about Apartheid South Africa (from a white perspective) Brink is the most successful in articulating the impossibility of white individ...more
I appreciated this book a lot more when I read it for a writing course in college. The second time around, almost seven years later, I found it to be sometimes tiresome and often predictable (I have a terrible memory, by the way, so it's being predictable is the not the result of my ability to remember what was going to happen.). Written during the 1970s, this was certainly an important book for Apartheid South Africa. That said, the dialogue was often painfully weak. A lot of "one has to blah b...more
I would give this book 3.5 stars. Andre Brink tells the story of one man's struggle for justice in Apartheid South Africa. Throughout the story, the main character, Ben Du Toit, a white South African(Afrikaaner), finds himself submerged in a world of racist corruption condoned by the government. This a dark read, much darker than I had anticipated upon picking up the book, with death coating many of the chapters. I appreciated this book because of its historical importance (it was banned in Sout...more
One of the books that shaped a great deal of my thinking as a teenager in a country, South Africa, which was in the throws of a deepening of apartheid - something that I had been sheltered from due to the control of the media by the State as well as the control of movement of different races. It remains on my shelf - and I intend re-reading it, as I am certain that the 30 years of life experience, as well as the end of Apartheid in South Africa. will provide me with a different reading experienc...more
I wanted to like this book a lot: Apartheid/post-Apartheid literature is more familiar to me than, for example, American literature on the whole. And in a way I did: Brink's writing was solid - at times. The story of the book, recounting the fall from grace of a commonly ignorant Afrikaner, was promising. And it gives me chills to observe the similarities of the political mindset of compliance in the Apartheid and Israeli contexts – some of the lines in this book read like quotes from modern-day...more
Sep 28, 2010
Fritz van Deventer
rated it
3 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
south-africa
Another one in my list of South African literature must reads. It's a little project I have to find out more about the country where my parents hailed from.
It is interesting for me to find out so many things and situations, that have of course been fictionalized, that have been completely unknown to me. The history books they tell it, but they tell it rather poorly and rather briefly. It least that is the case in the Netherlands where I think part of the conscience remembers the Dutch that we a...more
It is interesting for me to find out so many things and situations, that have of course been fictionalized, that have been completely unknown to me. The history books they tell it, but they tell it rather poorly and rather briefly. It least that is the case in the Netherlands where I think part of the conscience remembers the Dutch that we a...more
This is a well written mystery that unfolds page by page. It is enticing reading. I found it best to arrange my observations numerically.
1) It is possible to live in an oppressive society and not come to terms with it. This is willful to differing degrees, depending on the information to which people were exposed. The whites living in apartheid, who benefited from the system, didn't want to acknowledge the horrors of the oppression upon which their position in society was built. Most simply didn...more
1) It is possible to live in an oppressive society and not come to terms with it. This is willful to differing degrees, depending on the information to which people were exposed. The whites living in apartheid, who benefited from the system, didn't want to acknowledge the horrors of the oppression upon which their position in society was built. Most simply didn...more
2 likes · like · see review
Lately I've read several anti-apartheid novels by white South African authors, and they all seem to pull in a lot of the same themes--themes around which A Dry White Season is built. The privileged white protagonist beginning to take a stand not because of some internal moral spark, but because something happens to someone he or she cares about. The understanding that whiteness means the choice to opt out of the struggle and be forgiven by the dominant powers, even when you're in very deep. The...more
Thoughtful and disturbing story of what happens to an ordinary man in an extraordinary experience. An Afrikaans schoolteacher wants to know why a cleaner at his school died in detenion of the Security Police after looking into the death of his son in aftermath of rioting. The siege mentality of the white South Africans is frightening. Since this books was published and since the changes in South Africa, this could seem like any old story of aparthied but it's is powerful, moving, and very though...more
I could not put this book down. Andre Brink is an enormously talented writer and deserves the kind of international recognition that JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer enjoy.
This book tells the story of Ben Du Toit, an unremarkable Afrikaner school teacher in 1970's Johannesburg. He becomes involved in the education of the school janitor's son, and after the adolescent is killed in the Soweto Riots, Ben begins helping the black janitor (Gordon) in his quest to uncover the truth. Brink's story unfold...more
This book tells the story of Ben Du Toit, an unremarkable Afrikaner school teacher in 1970's Johannesburg. He becomes involved in the education of the school janitor's son, and after the adolescent is killed in the Soweto Riots, Ben begins helping the black janitor (Gordon) in his quest to uncover the truth. Brink's story unfold...more
1 like · like · see review
I gave this one 4 stars because I really liked the main story and the ideas about race but the "love" story bothered me as did the depiction of the wife (I just kept thinking why did this guy marry her?). And the passage where one character asks another about why they would be upset if another person close to them died? Made me want to scream!
This is perhaps my favorite book ever. It is fiction, but has a lot of truth in it. It will, and should disturb you. Everybody ought to be disturbed once in awhile -- if you're not, you're too sheltered.
I read this in South Africa in 1982 when Apartheid was still the law. I don't remember much about the book except that I loved it, and admired the author for his bravery in writing such a book.
About apartheid and all the crazy racism that occured in the late 1970s. A white man looks into the suspicious death of a black man, and the shit reigns down. Extremely well-written.
Originally published in Afrikaans as "'n Droë wit seisoen", and the first book in Afrikaans that I owned. The book that keeps haunting me, and made me want to be a better person. Brink is a great stylist, and by using a micro perspective he meticulously describes, dissects and exhibits the terror that was apartheid.
A definite read for any person interested in colonial history, politics and the production and reproduction of repressive political ideology.
A definite read for any person interested in colonial history, politics and the production and reproduction of repressive political ideology.
Excellent book depicting the troubles of South Africa. This book brought the condition and daily lives of South African blacks to the attention of the world. A must read.
It made for a pretty standard "isn't apartheid horrid" film, but the book has great power and anger. Not quite Breyten Breytenbach maybe, but principled and emotional stuff.
Apr 01, 2009
Richard
added it
This is an excellent novel. The writing - particularly about personal relationships - is brilliant. Brink does a fantastic job of developing his characters.
This was a hard book to read due to the harrowing stories that unfolded during apartheid South Africa in the 70s.
The main protagonist was a bit bland but at least Stanley livened up the narrative. A worthwhile read - 3 ½ stars.
The main protagonist was a bit bland but at least Stanley livened up the narrative. A worthwhile read - 3 ½ stars.
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
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| Dry White Season | 1 | 13 | Nov 02, 2009 04:17am |
André Philippus Brink is a South African novelist. He writes in Afrikaans and English and was until his retirement a Professor of English Literature at the University of Cape Town.
In the 1960s, he and Breyten Breytenbach were key figures in the Afrikaans literary movement known as Die Sestigers ("The Sixty-ers"). These writers sought to use Afrikaans as a language to speak against the apartheid go...more
More about André P. Brink...
In the 1960s, he and Breyten Breytenbach were key figures in the Afrikaans literary movement known as Die Sestigers ("The Sixty-ers"). These writers sought to use Afrikaans as a language to speak against the apartheid go...more
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“I had never been so close to death before.
For a long time, as I lay there trying to clear my mind, I couldn't think coherently at all, conscious only of a terrible, blind bitterness. Why had they singled me out? Didn't they understand? Had everything I'd gone through on their behalf been utterly in vain? Did it really count for nothing? What had happened to logic, meaning and sense?
But I feel much calmer now. It helps to discipline oneself like this, writing it down to see it set out on paper, to try and weigh it and find some significance in it.
Prof Bruwer: There are only two kinds of madness one should guard against, Ben. One is the belief that we can do everything. The other is the belief that we can do nothing.
I wanted to help. Right. I meant it very sincerely. But I wanted to do it on my terms. And I am white, and they are black. I thought it was still possible to reach beyond our whiteness and blackness. I thought that to reach out and touch hands across the gulf would be sufficient in itself. But I grasped so little, really: as if good intentions from my side could solve it all. It was presumptuous of me. In an ordinary world, in a natural one, I might have succeeded. But not in this deranged, divided age. I can do all I can for Gordon or scores of others who have come to me; I can imagine myself in their shoes, I can project myself into their suffering. But I cannot, ever, live their lives for them. So what else could come of it but failure?
Whether I like it or not, whether I feel like cursing my own condition or not -- and that would only serve to confirm my impotence -- I am white. This is the small, final, terrifying truth of my broken world. I am white. And because I am white I am born into a state of privilege. Even if I fight the system that has reduced us to this I remain white, and favored by the very circumstances I abhor. Even if I'm hated, and ostracized, and persecuted, and in the end destroyed, nothing can make me black. And so those who are cannot but remain suspicious of me. In their eyes my very efforts to identify myself with Gordon, whit all the Gordons, would be obscene. Every gesture I make, every act I commit in my efforts to help them makes it more difficult for them to define their real needs and discover for themselves their integrity and affirm their own dignity. How else could we hope to arrive beyond predator and prey, helper and helped, white and black, and find redemption?
On the other hand: what can I do but what I have done? I cannot choose not to intervene: that would be a denial and a mockery not only of everything I believe in, but of the hope that compassion may survive among men. By not acting as I did I would deny the very possibility of that gulf to be bridged.
If I act, I cannot but lose. But if I do not act, it is a different kind of defeat, equally decisive and maybe worse. Because then I will not even have a conscience left.
The end seems ineluctable: failure, defeat, loss. The only choice I have left is whether I am prepared to salvage a little honour, a little decency, a little humanity -- or nothing. It seems as if a sacrifice is impossible to avoid, whatever way one looks at it. But at least one has the choice between a wholly futile sacrifice and one that might, in the long run, open up a possibility, however negligible or dubious, of something better, less sordid and more noble, for our children…
They live on. We, the fathers, have lost.”
—
5 people liked it
For a long time, as I lay there trying to clear my mind, I couldn't think coherently at all, conscious only of a terrible, blind bitterness. Why had they singled me out? Didn't they understand? Had everything I'd gone through on their behalf been utterly in vain? Did it really count for nothing? What had happened to logic, meaning and sense?
But I feel much calmer now. It helps to discipline oneself like this, writing it down to see it set out on paper, to try and weigh it and find some significance in it.
Prof Bruwer: There are only two kinds of madness one should guard against, Ben. One is the belief that we can do everything. The other is the belief that we can do nothing.
I wanted to help. Right. I meant it very sincerely. But I wanted to do it on my terms. And I am white, and they are black. I thought it was still possible to reach beyond our whiteness and blackness. I thought that to reach out and touch hands across the gulf would be sufficient in itself. But I grasped so little, really: as if good intentions from my side could solve it all. It was presumptuous of me. In an ordinary world, in a natural one, I might have succeeded. But not in this deranged, divided age. I can do all I can for Gordon or scores of others who have come to me; I can imagine myself in their shoes, I can project myself into their suffering. But I cannot, ever, live their lives for them. So what else could come of it but failure?
Whether I like it or not, whether I feel like cursing my own condition or not -- and that would only serve to confirm my impotence -- I am white. This is the small, final, terrifying truth of my broken world. I am white. And because I am white I am born into a state of privilege. Even if I fight the system that has reduced us to this I remain white, and favored by the very circumstances I abhor. Even if I'm hated, and ostracized, and persecuted, and in the end destroyed, nothing can make me black. And so those who are cannot but remain suspicious of me. In their eyes my very efforts to identify myself with Gordon, whit all the Gordons, would be obscene. Every gesture I make, every act I commit in my efforts to help them makes it more difficult for them to define their real needs and discover for themselves their integrity and affirm their own dignity. How else could we hope to arrive beyond predator and prey, helper and helped, white and black, and find redemption?
On the other hand: what can I do but what I have done? I cannot choose not to intervene: that would be a denial and a mockery not only of everything I believe in, but of the hope that compassion may survive among men. By not acting as I did I would deny the very possibility of that gulf to be bridged.
If I act, I cannot but lose. But if I do not act, it is a different kind of defeat, equally decisive and maybe worse. Because then I will not even have a conscience left.
The end seems ineluctable: failure, defeat, loss. The only choice I have left is whether I am prepared to salvage a little honour, a little decency, a little humanity -- or nothing. It seems as if a sacrifice is impossible to avoid, whatever way one looks at it. But at least one has the choice between a wholly futile sacrifice and one that might, in the long run, open up a possibility, however negligible or dubious, of something better, less sordid and more noble, for our children…
They live on. We, the fathers, have lost.”
“How dare I presume to say: He is my friend, or even, more cautiously, I think I know him? At the very most we are like two strangers meeting in the white wintry veld and sitting down together for a while to smoke a pipe before proceeding on their separate ways. No more.
Alone. Alone to the very end. I… every one of us. But to have been granted the grace of meeting and touching so fleetingly: is that not the most awesome and wonderful thing one can hope for in this world?”
—
3 people liked it
More quotes…
Alone. Alone to the very end. I… every one of us. But to have been granted the grace of meeting and touching so fleetingly: is that not the most awesome and wonderful thing one can hope for in this world?”
