SOURCE: "André Brink's South Africa: A Quality of Light," in Critique, Vol. 34, No. 1, Fall, 1992, pp. 19-32.

Drawing on ideas from Vincent Van Gogh and Milan Kundera in the following essay, Andon-Milligan explores the aesthetics of Brink's work in which she sees a convergence of love and art and an ongoing attempt to tell love stories that can never be completed.

Exile, for artists like Milan Kundera, includes the "unbearable lightness of being." For others, exile means the obsessive hallucinations of a "Hottentot Room" (Christopher Hope) or the fetid rubbish left behind after Doris Lessing's "Good Terrorists" have swept past. Some of André Brink's exiles anticipate another outbreak of the Black Plague, the same plague that swept away Francesco Petrarca's Laura and much of Europe (The Wall of the Plague). Unfortunately, plagues do not spare artists: Van Gogh's personal plague left him mad and suicidal; Brink's plague drives him...