SOURCE: "A Pipsqueak's Obsession," in New York Times Book Review, Vol. 91, June 29, 1986, p. 21.

In the following review, novelist Stade explores the themes and imbroglios of The Ambassador.

"I was born on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, in the early spring of 1960," André Brink has written. He was in his mid-20's at the time. He was born again in 1968, during a second visit to Paris, when he was "caught up" in the student demonstrations. These Parisian rebirths, in Mr. Brink's own formulations, were political, literary, metaphysical and sexual, the outcome of a "romantic love-affair" with the city. When he first arrived in Paris, fresh from South Africa, he was comfortable with his Afrikaner convictions, stiffened by his religion and its puritanism; but then, as he puts it, he was transformed by "that great metropolis where every single thing I had taken for granted now had...