SOURCE: "André Brink's Bawdy Romp," in Tribune Books, September 5, 1993, p. 3.

In the following review, Larson presents an appreciation of Cape of Storms: The First Life of Adamastor in which he sees "a comic masterpiece."

André Brink must have had great fun writing "Cape of Storms." There is nothing so rollicking in this South African novelist's earlier works (A Dry White Season, Rumors of Rain, etc.) nothing nearly as playful or as bawdy, nothing quite so terse, certainly nothing so parabolic. Only the matter of cultural interaction (or lack thereof) unites this mythic gem with Brink's bleak earlier accounts of man's inhumanity to his fellow man under what was—and what subsequently became officially sanctified—apartheid in South Africa.

In an introductory chapter beginning "Once upon a time there was and there wasn't," Brink explains the rationale behind his daring venture into the territory of myth. Harkening back to...