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kellyk_15's review
3.0
While I was reading the first half of this book, I really and truly hated it and Andre Brink. Nearly every time a female character was brought up or mentioned her breasts were mentioned as well. Even when Ben goes to see Gordon's corpse, he is ogling the dead women's breasts. It bothered me and distracted me from the actual novel more than I've ever been distracted before; instead of caring about Ben's goals and getting justice for Gordon I was too busy waiting for another woman to be sexualized and being frustrated when they were. I am ashamed but not surprised that no other review has mentioned this, since the majority are written by old men. If this book had ended after the first half, it would have received two stars from me. The sexualization alone brought it down to one star but the actual story and plot earned a star. However, the second half was able to earn it another star. There were very few mentions of breasts and only a little sexualization of women, and the story was mostly focused on Ben's story instead of how each woman's breasts looked. I could actually enjoy this part of the novel instead of being distracted by how each woman was described. However, I do believe that if I hadn't needed to read this book for a class I would have DNF'd it a long time ago. I was very frustrated with the sexualization in the first half and if I wanted to read a book about apartheid there are others I could pick up instead of constantly having to read the sexualization of women! The book would have carried so much more meaning for me if it had only not focused on breasts!
Despite the second half having more substance, I still think Andre Brink is extremely sexist. This book (and author) may not be worth your time, to be completely honest. I suggest trying something else if you want to read a book about apartheid that won't! sexualize! women!
Despite the second half having more substance, I still think Andre Brink is extremely sexist. This book (and author) may not be worth your time, to be completely honest. I suggest trying something else if you want to read a book about apartheid that won't! sexualize! women!
berethnetqueen's review
Really liked it but had to read it for school and didn't finish in time, so had to hand it in again.
lucy_blossom's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
stennyi's review
3.0
Really more like 2.5 stars. It's was an ok read. Could have def been shorter. I find myself being very judgmental of the lead character. I suppose a white male author can only demonstrate the absolute absurdity and corruption of apartheid by using a white male protagonist? Ehh...whateves. I'm not that familiar with South African literature so this was a nice intro. If I read another South African novel, I'd like to read one by a black author.
lize_ann's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
tracystan's review
4.0
Very timely read about Apartheid, and the coverup of a man's death while in police custody. Well-written, and, though not an easy subject, an easy to follow story that is very affecting.
This would be a great book group read, though it could easily spark some volatile discussion.
This would be a great book group read, though it could easily spark some volatile discussion.
mishlist's review
5.0
"From a very early age one accepts, or believes, or is told, that certain things exist in a certain manner. For example: that society is based on order, on reason, on justice. And that, whenever anything goes wrong, one can appeal to an innate decency, or commonsense, or a notion of legality in people to rectify the error and offer redress. Then, without warning, there occurs what Melanie said and what I refused to believe: you discover that what you accepted as premises and basic conditions - what you had no choice but to accept if you wanted to survive at all - simply does not exist.
Where you expected something solid there turns out to be just nothing....Everything one used to take for granted, with so much certainty that one never even bothered to enquire about it, now turns out to be illusion. Your certainties are proven lies. And what happens if you start probing? Must you learn a wholly new language first?...The problem is: one you've caught a glimpse of it, once you've merely started suspecting it, it is useless to pretend it's different....the only question that matters is the one she asked: What now?
It has begun. A pure, elemental motion: something happened - I reacted - something opposed me. A vast, clumsy, shapeless thing has stirred. Is that the reason of my dazed state? Let's try to be reasonable, objective: am I not totally helpless, in fact irrelevant, in a movement so vast and intricate? Isn't the mere thought of an individual trying to intervene preposterous?
Or am I putting the wrong questions now? Is there any sense in trying to be "reasonable", in finding "practical" arguments? Surely, if I were to consider what I might "achieve" in a practical sense I couldn't even hope to begin. So it must be something else. But what? Perhaps simply to do what one has to do, because you're you, because you're there. I am Ben Du Toit. I'm here. There's no one else but myself right here, today. So there must be something no one but me can do: not because it's "important" or "effective", but because only I can do it. I have to do it because I happen to be Ben Du Toit; because no one else in the world is Ben Du Toit.
And so it is beside the point to ask: what will become of me? Or: how can I act against my own people? Perhaps that is part of the very choice involved: the fact that I've always taken "my own people" so much for granted that I now have to start thinking from scratch. It has never been a problem to me before. "My own people" have always been around me and with me. On the hard farm where I grew up, in church on Sundays, at auctions, in school; on stations and in trains or in towns; in the slums of Kurgersdorp; in my suburb. People speaking my language, taking the name of my God on their lips, sharing my history. That history which Gie calls "the History of European Civilisation in South Africa". My people who have survived for three centuries and who have now taken control - and who are now threatened with extinction.
"My people". And then there were the "others". The Jewish shopkeeper, the English chemist; those who found a natural habitat in the city. And the blacks. The boys who tended the sheep with me, and stole apricots with me, and scared the people at the huts with pumpkin ghosts, and who were punished with me, and yet were different. We lived in a house, they in mud huts with rocks on the roof. They took over our discarded clothes. They had to knock on the kitchen door. They laid our table, brought up our children, emptied our chamber pots, called us Baas and Mtestes . We looked after them and valued their services, and taught them the Gospel and helped them, knowing theirs was a hard life. But it remained a matter of "us" and "them". It was a good and comfortable division; it was right that people shouldn't mix...that was the way it had always been.
But suddenly it is no longer adequate, it no longer works. Something has changed irrevocably. I stood on my knees beside the coffin of a friend. I spoke to a woman mourning in a kitchen the way my own mother might have mourned. I saw a father searching for his son the way I might have tried to find my own. And that mourning and that search had been caused by "my people".
But who are "my people" today? To whom do I owe my loyalty? There must be someone, something. Or is one totally alone on that bare veld beside the name of a non-existent station?"
Where you expected something solid there turns out to be just nothing....Everything one used to take for granted, with so much certainty that one never even bothered to enquire about it, now turns out to be illusion. Your certainties are proven lies. And what happens if you start probing? Must you learn a wholly new language first?...The problem is: one you've caught a glimpse of it, once you've merely started suspecting it, it is useless to pretend it's different....the only question that matters is the one she asked: What now?
It has begun. A pure, elemental motion: something happened - I reacted - something opposed me. A vast, clumsy, shapeless thing has stirred. Is that the reason of my dazed state? Let's try to be reasonable, objective: am I not totally helpless, in fact irrelevant, in a movement so vast and intricate? Isn't the mere thought of an individual trying to intervene preposterous?
Or am I putting the wrong questions now? Is there any sense in trying to be "reasonable", in finding "practical" arguments? Surely, if I were to consider what I might "achieve" in a practical sense I couldn't even hope to begin. So it must be something else. But what? Perhaps simply to do what one has to do, because you're you, because you're there. I am Ben Du Toit. I'm here. There's no one else but myself right here, today. So there must be something no one but me can do: not because it's "important" or "effective", but because only I can do it. I have to do it because I happen to be Ben Du Toit; because no one else in the world is Ben Du Toit.
And so it is beside the point to ask: what will become of me? Or: how can I act against my own people? Perhaps that is part of the very choice involved: the fact that I've always taken "my own people" so much for granted that I now have to start thinking from scratch. It has never been a problem to me before. "My own people" have always been around me and with me. On the hard farm where I grew up, in church on Sundays, at auctions, in school; on stations and in trains or in towns; in the slums of Kurgersdorp; in my suburb. People speaking my language, taking the name of my God on their lips, sharing my history. That history which Gie calls "the History of European Civilisation in South Africa". My people who have survived for three centuries and who have now taken control - and who are now threatened with extinction.
"My people". And then there were the "others". The Jewish shopkeeper, the English chemist; those who found a natural habitat in the city. And the blacks. The boys who tended the sheep with me, and stole apricots with me, and scared the people at the huts with pumpkin ghosts, and who were punished with me, and yet were different. We lived in a house, they in mud huts with rocks on the roof. They took over our discarded clothes. They had to knock on the kitchen door. They laid our table, brought up our children, emptied our chamber pots, called us Baas and Mtestes . We looked after them and valued their services, and taught them the Gospel and helped them, knowing theirs was a hard life. But it remained a matter of "us" and "them". It was a good and comfortable division; it was right that people shouldn't mix...that was the way it had always been.
But suddenly it is no longer adequate, it no longer works. Something has changed irrevocably. I stood on my knees beside the coffin of a friend. I spoke to a woman mourning in a kitchen the way my own mother might have mourned. I saw a father searching for his son the way I might have tried to find my own. And that mourning and that search had been caused by "my people".
But who are "my people" today? To whom do I owe my loyalty? There must be someone, something. Or is one totally alone on that bare veld beside the name of a non-existent station?"
enora's review
dark
informative
inspiring
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
hayesstw's review
5.0
I read this book 34 years ago, but with the death of [a:Andre Brink|1409320|André Brink|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1213875970p2/1409320.jpg] it's perhaps time to write a review of it. I will, however, have to write it from memory, because I lent my copy of the book to someone soon after I'd read it and never got it back.
The great merit of this book is that it tells it like it was.
It is an absolutely true-to-life story set in South Africa of the late 1970s. It is told from the point of view of an Afrikaner school teacher who gradually discovers what lies just under the surface, of society, which at first he can't believe. He thinks there must be some mistake, this sort of thing can't happen. But as he gets drawn in he discovers that such things not only can happen, but they do. And eventually they not only hasppen to other people, they happen to him.
In a way it is a South African version of [a:Franz Kafka|5223|Franz Kafka|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1412460277p2/5223.jpg]'s [b:The trial|17690|The Trial|Franz Kafka|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320399438s/17690.jpg|2965832], though without the surreal element. Brink writes soberly, without exaggeration, without hype, but it is absolutely authentic. This is how it was.
A film was made of it, but because it was filmed in the time of apartheid, it is as inauthentic as the book is authentic, because it was filmed in Zimbabwe.
I think that is one film that really does deserve a remake, in a South African setting, with South African actors. Some remakes I've seen, like The taking of Pelham 1 2 3, or The flight of the Phoenix were unnecessary, and no better and in some ways worse than the originals. But this one cries out for a remake.
One of the problems with the film of A dry white season is that it was set in an English-style private prep school, where the kids wore English school caps, and the setting was horribly unlike an Afrikaans high school, and so missed the point. When I read the book I pictured the kids in the brown and gold blazers of Helpmekaar Hoerskool. I'm not sure what [a:Andre Brink|1409320|André Brink|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1213875970p2/1409320.jpg] pictured when he was writing it, but Helpmekaar would have been an authentic seeting.
It will perhaps be more difficult to find an authentic black township nowadays, as many of the locations are very different from what they were like in the 1970s, so it needs someone to do it soon.
The great merit of this book is that it tells it like it was.
It is an absolutely true-to-life story set in South Africa of the late 1970s. It is told from the point of view of an Afrikaner school teacher who gradually discovers what lies just under the surface, of society, which at first he can't believe. He thinks there must be some mistake, this sort of thing can't happen. But as he gets drawn in he discovers that such things not only can happen, but they do. And eventually they not only hasppen to other people, they happen to him.
In a way it is a South African version of [a:Franz Kafka|5223|Franz Kafka|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1412460277p2/5223.jpg]'s [b:The trial|17690|The Trial|Franz Kafka|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320399438s/17690.jpg|2965832], though without the surreal element. Brink writes soberly, without exaggeration, without hype, but it is absolutely authentic. This is how it was.
A film was made of it, but because it was filmed in the time of apartheid, it is as inauthentic as the book is authentic, because it was filmed in Zimbabwe.
I think that is one film that really does deserve a remake, in a South African setting, with South African actors. Some remakes I've seen, like The taking of Pelham 1 2 3, or The flight of the Phoenix were unnecessary, and no better and in some ways worse than the originals. But this one cries out for a remake.
One of the problems with the film of A dry white season is that it was set in an English-style private prep school, where the kids wore English school caps, and the setting was horribly unlike an Afrikaans high school, and so missed the point. When I read the book I pictured the kids in the brown and gold blazers of Helpmekaar Hoerskool. I'm not sure what [a:Andre Brink|1409320|André Brink|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1213875970p2/1409320.jpg] pictured when he was writing it, but Helpmekaar would have been an authentic seeting.
It will perhaps be more difficult to find an authentic black township nowadays, as many of the locations are very different from what they were like in the 1970s, so it needs someone to do it soon.
yarahossam's review
3.0
I am too immersed in what happened in Soweto to give an actual feedback about the main character's decolonized perspective. I appreciate the amazing writing which viewed Ben Du Toit's greatly deconstructed approach towards the extreme annexed thought that has been implanted into the whites' minds ever since the dawn of day. Its a euphoric struggle to be in the right and not having anyone see it except years later. Everyone is against him and its unbearable.
The book is dry somewhat though.
The book is dry somewhat though.