“I’ve spent my whole life crossing frontiers”: André Brink e il lungo viaggio verso l’Altro

A prolific writer of unrivalled energy, André Brink has gained international reputation as a major dissident Afrikaner, the first 20th-century novelist of his ethnic group to bring a serious political challenge to the apartheid system. Awarded with prizes and honours all over the world and shortlisted three times for the Nobel Prize, Brink has always been associated with other white-skinned giants of South African Literature, such as J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. Surprisingly, however, attention has been scarcely paid to the quality and ethical poignancy of his literary production, as shown by the very few monographs devoted to an exploration of his entire macrotext. The aim of this article is to contribute to an auspiciously growing debate on this influential contemporary author, in the attempt to trace the fundamental steps of his narrative path and highlight both its thematic constants and stylistic evolution. Bearing in mind André Brink’s own famous statement, “I’ve spent my whole life crossing frontiers” (Brink, 1993), this article will thus provide an overview of the literary production of an artist who embraced border-crossing as a life- and writing-style.