by André Philippus Brink · ISBN 9782234042872
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In the dungeon where he awaits his torment, Estienne Barbier writes to Rosette, an illiterate black slave whom he freed in the past and has never seen again. He tells her the amazing epic that, from the Orléans countryside, still imbued with the memory of Joan of Arc, where he was born, led him to southern Africa in the 1730s, already stained by corruption and colonial tyranny. There, he became a bandit, soon launched with a band of rebellious farmers to the conquest of Monomotapa, mythical kingdom, symbol of all their dreams. But Barbier is not only a repairer of wrongs. Lustful, liar, unrepentant reader of Don Quixote, he mixes at every moment the true and the false, the confession and the fable. What should we believe? Inspired by a historical character, the novelist of A White and Dry Season, foreign Medicis prize 1980, gives us a most modern meditation on the fundamental ambiguity of all narrative.
André Philippus Brink was a South African novelist, essayist and poet. He wrote in both Afrikaans and English and taught English at the University of Cape Town.
