Brink on our miscegenous leanings

Short, sharp guidance and observations from a journalist with attitude. All books available from Exclusives

IF YOU READ ONE BOOK THIS WEEK

'The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared', by Jonas Jonasson (Hesperus Press) R140

ON HIS 100th birthday, Allan Karlsson flees the old people's home and the birthday party he never wanted, embarking on an epic, picaresque journey in what must be one of the funniest novels of the year.

THE ISSUE

At 720 pages, Tom Wolfe's forthcoming Back to Blood promises to be one of the big holiday must-reads this summer. Set in a sweltering and racially charged Miami against the backdrop of the annual Biscayne Bay Regatta, it's been puffed as "another brilliant, scrupulous and often hilarious reckoning with our times".

The novel's cast of characters promises one hell of a ride: a Cuban mayor, a black police chief, an ambitious journalist, his "Yale-marinated" editor, a psychiatrist specialising in sex addiction, his Latina nurse/paramour, her former Hispanic cop boyfriend, a refined young Haitian woman and her gang-banging younger brother, a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers, "de-skilled" conceptual artists, shady Russians and yachting fans hunting down that night's orgy.

CRASH COURSE

In a recent interview with the Observer, André Brink - whose new novel, Philida, about a 19th-century slave living on a Western Cape farm run by his ancestors, has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize - spoke of the challenges in writing in his protagonist's voice.

"On the one hand, difficult," he told the newspaper. "On the other, imagining yourself into the skin, life, thoughts of another human being is really what a writer does from the first moment.

"There was an audacity and cheek involved as a white person in imagining yourself into the skin of a black woman. But over so many years, the coming together of black and white has entered so deeply into my subconscious that perhaps the effort did not need to be too extreme."

In the book, Brink has fictionalised his own family history and described how Philida was sexually and physically abused by his forebears - a process that affected him "very deeply", he said.

"I was only too aware at every step of the way what dangerous territory I was treading on. It made the challenge huge. At the same time, there was a very deep and peculiar sense of fulfilment."

One of the discoveries in writing the novel, he added, was how common miscegenation was in South Africa - despite apartheid's notions of racial purity. "It was astounding to discover how much it was the rule, rather than the exception."

THE BOTTOM LINE

"Will I not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Centre rise again? To read - if not to write - the obituaries of villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?" - Mortality, by Christopher Hitchens (Atlantic Books)