The Love Song of André P Brink, Leon de Kock’s eagerly awaited account of André Brink’s life, is out in May from Jonathan Ball Publishers.
The book is richly informed by a previously unavailable literary treasure: the dissident Afrikaner’s hoard of journal-writing, a veritable chronicle that was fifty-four years in the making.
In this massive new biographical source—running to a million words—Brink does not spare himself, or anyone else for that matter, as he narrates the ups and downs of his five marriages and his compulsive affairs with a great number of women. These are precisely the topics that the rebel in both politics and sex skated over in his memoir, A Fork in the Road.
De Kock’s biographical study measures the journals against additional sources, both scholarly and otherwise, among them the testimony of Brink’s friends, family, wives and lovers.
