SOURCE: "The Fear of Literature," in The New Republic, Vol. 190, No. 17, April 30, 1984, pp. 29-33.

In the following piece, the expatriate Czech novelist and essayist Josef Skvorecky reviews Brink's collection of essays Writing in a State of Siege. Skvorecky explores the similarities in political climate and state censorship between Brink's South Africa and Skvorecky's native Czechoslovakia.

Among the many remarkable features of Writing in a State of Siege, a collection of literary essays and speeches written between 1967 and 1982, one is particularly useful to us who know South Africa only from contemporary newspapers and from the false consciousness of television. That is the author's introduction. It sketches out the unique history of the white people of the southern tip of the African continent, and sheds light on what, for most of us, is the Afrikaner paradox, the mess that this heroic race of men and women find themselves in at...