3.5 stars, rounded up. After a strong opening I found this faded a bit, especially the dialog, which was a touch stilted. The Tessa character always seemed a bit unreal and was a second weakness. The story of life in South Africa around 2000 is incredibly sad but interesting, and the relationship between Ruben, our narrator, and his house-keeper Magrieta solid and quite warm. The central theme is Ruben (in his mid-60's with a dodgy ticker) taking in an attractive lodger and the disruption to his life that falling in love with her precipitates. Tessa leads Ruben to reevaluate his life and look honestly at his less than rosy but largely suppressed past, something he has studiously avoided, plus of course, to lust after her 30 year old youthfulness. Brink was mid-sixties when this was published, just sayin'. The supernatural element was very much magical realism and didn't bug me as it sometimes does, and plays an important role in the tale.
This is my third Brink novel and I'll read more, but go to his top reviewed titles next- I selected this one as I was curious about the title. ( )

The last André Brink book I read was the apartheid-era protest novel A dry white season. By contrast, this one is set against the background of the New South Africa, amidst the criminality and failing public services of Cape Town at the end of the twentieth century, with an underlying feeling that it's a lot easier to protest against abuses and injustices than it is to see a way forward for fixing a broken society, particularly if you happen to be an ageing white liberal.

The widowed Ruben Olivier, 65 years old (the same age as the author), lives in a big old house on the fringes of the city. His sons see no future in South Africa and are emigrating, his best friend has been murdered, and Ruben is left alone with his elderly housekeeper Magrieta and the house ghost, the 18th-century slave Antje of Bengal. The sons, having failed to persuade him to come to Australia or Canada, suggest that he take in some lodgers to provide a bit of company and security: they are thinking of a nice, middle-aged couple, but what turns up to answer the advertisement is Tessa, a thoroughly modern young woman. She and Ruben could hardly be more different, but he both likes her and (covertly) fancies her sexually, she seems to like his company (but doesn't especially want to have sex with him). When she also wins the approval of the cats, Antje and — more grudgingly — Magrieta, it's obvious that she's in.

This gives Brink the framework for a sensitive but rather complex and tenuous exploration of the interplay of love, sexual desire, history, violence and death, and the way that stories, whether fictional or derived from memories or historical documents, are never more than partial representations of the truth. We dig into Antje's story of passion, exploitation and murder two hundred years ago, into Magrieta's life as a coloured person displaced from District Six in the 1970s and now the victim of mob violence in Cape Flats, into the real story of Ruben's "happy" marriage, into Tessa's searching for a substitute for her absent father and finding only men to exploit her, and are shown the way all of these things are bound to end badly, when seen from Ruben's pessimistic (and permanently horny) perspective.

There's a lot of very interesting and perceptive writing here. There's also obviously something rather uncomfortable about spending 300 pages with Ruben's sexual obsession, but Brink knows how we are likely to react (after all, he had a long history of marrying younger women himself...), and he makes sure that Ruben is never trying to justify himself with the reader, and that Tessa's modern instinct to talk everything through prevents his obsession with her from building up into a destructive secret. (Tessa, although born in 1970, often seems to belong more to Brink's generation than her own — even the shocking modern music she listens to turns out to be The Velvet Underground...) ( )