Before I Forget - Softcover

Brink, André

Softcover

ISBN 10: 043620553X ISBN 13: 9780436205538

Publisher: Secker, 2004

Synopsis

From a world-class writer – a remarkable new novel about love in all its forms.

Chris Minaar is a distinguished South African writer; an old writer, a writer who has lost whatever gift he had for writing. It is on New Year’s Eve, courtesy of his stalled car, that he meets Rachel, a young sculptress, who becomes the great love of his life, a love greater for being unfulfilled.

Having believed that his remaining function should be to comfort his mother, more than a century old now, he finds himself captivated by Rachel and drawn into a close friendship with her photographer husband George, a friendship that inevitably threatens this precarious triangular relationship.

Woven through this is the story of his life and of a lifetime of loving many women including brief affairs, extended affairs, a marriage; intensely carnal encounters and tender attachments. From Daphne, the troubled dancer, to Bonnie, his authoritarian father’s secretary, and Grethe, who arranges for her many lovers to meet at a party in her absence, these women define and inform his life.

As it becomes clear that this book is the final writing act of Chris’s creative life, so we understand that the recollection of these many loves is an attempt to bring order to an otherwise chaotic existence. Erotic, searingly honest, elegiac and profoundly moving, Before I Forget is the history of a life set against the history of a nation, and the history of a transforming love.


From the Hardcover edition.

About this title

About the Author

Andre Brink (1935 - 2015) was one of South Africa's most prominent writers and is the author of several novels, including A Dry White Season, Imaginings of Sand, The Rights of Desire, The Other Side of Silence and Philida. He has won South Africa's most important literay prize, the CNA Award, three times and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His last novel, Philida, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012.

Edition details

• Publisher: Secker
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 043620553X
• ISBN 13: 9780436205538
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320