Novel
A Dry White Season
André Brink · 1979
Synopsis
A writer receives the papers entrusted to him by Ben du Toit, a respected Afrikaner teacher from Johannesburg, and reconstructs his story. Gordon Ngubene, the school's maintenance man, has asked him to help find his son Jonathan, caught up in a demonstration; the boy dies in detention, of “natural causes” according to the police, then Gordon in his turn. Ben investigates, with the lawyer Dan Levinson, the activist Stanley Makhaya and the journalist Melanie Bruwer; witnesses disappear, his house is searched, his wife and colleagues turn away from him.
Context
The novel was published in London in 1979 and was immediately banned in South Africa, where it circulated clandestinely. The framing of the narrative, a writer putting a dead man's papers in order, announces Ben's fate from the outset and gives the book its tension. The French translation was published by Stock in 1980. In 1989 Euzhan Palcy made it into a film, with Donald Sutherland as Ben du Toit and Marlon Brando as the lawyer.
Who it is for
A novel in English, built like an investigation; the reader knows the outcome in advance, and the suspense lies in the manner.
Prizes and reception
Prix Médicis étranger 1980 for its French translation; banned in its own country, it circulated there clandestinely.