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The Blue Door by Andre Brink
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The Blue Door (edition 2007)

by Andre Brink (Author)

Series: Other Lives (1)

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445569,770 (3.43)1
The Blue Door is built around one of the oldest questions in storytelling: What if ...' What if I return home one day to find, behind a familiar door, an unfamiliar world? What if the people closest to me turn out to be strangers? What if strangers start claiming a place in my life I cannot imagine? What if the memories of the most important moments in my life can no longer be trusted? What if I am not who I think I am? David le Roux, a teacher recently turned fulltime artist, returns to his studio one afternoon to find his whole familiar world turned upside down. The woman who opens the door and welcomes him as her husband is a complete stranger to him: beautiful and loving, but not the wife he assumes he has been married to for nine years. The children are overjoyed at his return, but he has never set eyes on them before. And when he goes back to the building he believes he lives in, it no longer exists. Has everything in his life been illusion? Or is the past real and only the present a hallucination? In a country like South Africa these questions may decide a whole life. Instead of living with the consequences of early choices he now discovers that behind every choice made lurks the possibility of innumerable other choices not made. What if, indeed ...'… (more)
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English (3)  Dutch (2)  All languages (5)
Showing 3 of 3
It’s been a very long time since I read anything by South African author André Brink (1935-2015): I think I discovered him at the library when he was shortlisted for the Booker for the second time with Rumours of Rain (1978). (An Instant in the Wind was shortlisted in 1975). I remember reading four or five of his books, and although I didn’t keep a journal in those days, I still vividly remember The Other Side of Silence (1982). Brink was a great writer, passionate and fearless about exposing apartheid to the world, and remarkable as a bilingual author, writing his novels simultaneously in both Afrikaans and in English.

The Blue Door is, however, not a novel: it’s a slim novella of only 122 tantalising pages. It asks the question what if… what if reality suddenly shifts and everything that is familiar no longer exists. In the course of the story Brink references Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphoses and Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart and what happens to David Le Roux is somewhat similar. When he lies in bed with a wife called Sarah who he’s never seen before, she is reading Murakami’s novel and ponders Miu’s disorientating experience of shifting dimensions, changing places with herself. David, since he stepped inside the blue door, has been confronted not only by Sarah, but also two children that he has apparently fathered and who expect him to tell him the usual bedtime story – a fairy story that happens to allude to very similar circumstances to his own situation.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/09/28/the-blue-door-by-andre-brink/ ( )
  anzlitlovers | Sep 27, 2016 |
This is the first fiction by Andre Brink that I've read.His non-fiction (essays,etc. are brilliant). Good writing here, as expected, but alternate histories/parallel universe stuff still doesn't appeal to me personally. Interesting story though. ( )
  posthumose | Jul 10, 2008 |
More a story than a novel, but a very powerful story. A man opens a door, and finds himself into a life he could have lived, if he had been a bit bolder. The book is a plea for personal courage when making important choices in life. Besides this, it is very well written, as I would expect from Brink, one of my favourite writers. ( )
  tsutsik | Oct 14, 2007 |
Showing 3 of 3
David le Roux, suburban white South African and wannabe artist, has trouble finding the door to his life. Actually, his problem is that there are many doors, with many different potential lives behind them, and he must choose just one. A banal predicament? Sure. Countless people bemoan it every day over coffee or booze. But in this book, André Brink contrives a way to reinvest it with potency and philosophical intrigue.
 

» Add other authors (1 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
André Brinkprimary authorall editionscalculated
Lameris, MarianTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Veer, Rob van derTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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The Blue Door is built around one of the oldest questions in storytelling: What if ...' What if I return home one day to find, behind a familiar door, an unfamiliar world? What if the people closest to me turn out to be strangers? What if strangers start claiming a place in my life I cannot imagine? What if the memories of the most important moments in my life can no longer be trusted? What if I am not who I think I am? David le Roux, a teacher recently turned fulltime artist, returns to his studio one afternoon to find his whole familiar world turned upside down. The woman who opens the door and welcomes him as her husband is a complete stranger to him: beautiful and loving, but not the wife he assumes he has been married to for nine years. The children are overjoyed at his return, but he has never set eyes on them before. And when he goes back to the building he believes he lives in, it no longer exists. Has everything in his life been illusion? Or is the past real and only the present a hallucination? In a country like South Africa these questions may decide a whole life. Instead of living with the consequences of early choices he now discovers that behind every choice made lurks the possibility of innumerable other choices not made. What if, indeed ...'

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