An Act of Terror

An Act of terroris a novel by South African novelist, essayist and poet, Andre Brink. The novel is first published in 1991. It centers around a young Afrikaner who is drawn into a conspiracy to assassinate the president of South Africa. The attempt fails, leaving innocent bystanders dead in its wake. The Afrikaner flees consumed with grief but still convinced of the rightness of his actions.

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Quotes

• Everything has become abstract, disembodied. What used to be immediate and original loses its meaning in distance and indeterminacy. If I whisper ‘Two birds in a tree’ in someone’s ear, I need not take responsibility if it emerges at the other side as ‘Who heard the scream?’ That is the way weexpect it to be. We bank on disembodiment and abstraction. The very finger that presses the red button in an ultimate war has been absolved ofresponsibility in advance, as all it does is execute some anonymous decisionor instruction, unleashing a war that takes place at a distance ... No one is present any more. No message is ever fresh, or immediate, or innocent
  • Page 122

• “Something, I fear, will remain forever incomplete
  • Page 122

• Circle upon circle the different layers of my existence are finally drawn in

towards me, like a kaross, here, now

• • Page 611

• first humanoids, the inhabitants of Taung three million years ago
  • Page 611

• In the late sunlight, into the sunset, into the falling dusk, I walked back. It

felt as if I was walking back through time, through years and centuries, through at least thirteen generations: gathering as I went on, at every step, all the accumulated blood and violence and death

• • Page 583

• One is also a reaction to it, a rebellion against it; in the process of amplifying or testing it, trying to corroborate it, one also rejects and replaces it
  • Page 826

• Perhaps the whole reason for the chronicle I have been driven for so long to write and which I am now ready, at last, to embark on, is this very need torecord, to thwart forgetfulness, to grasp at that truth which is not so much the opposite of the lie as of forgetting. A-letheia
  • Page 625

• his male business about who begat whom
  • Page 638

External links

• Researchgate
• Goodreads
• Amazon