It would be a pleasure only to say that ["An Instant in the Wind"] was a brave cry against the murdering, racist society that still rules South Africa today. It is, but novels must be more than political acts of defiance, and it is not enough to fill pages with material that will shock official taste. Once we adjust to the fact that Elizabeth and Adam are not the same color, we cannot help noticing that, apart from this, André Brink has written and overwritten a hackneyed love story that drags on and on through long passages of tedious landscape descriptions and stilted romantic interchanges. It is important, for political reasons, that Brink should be published, but doubtful on the evidence of this book that he will be read for his art as a writer.

Raymond A. Sokolov, "'An Instant in the Wind'," in The New York Times...