The rights of desire
The rights of desire is a novel by South African novelist, essayist and poet, Andre Brink. The novel centers around Ruben Olivier, who leads an isolated existence in a Cape Town suburb. His wife has died, one of his sons has settled in Australia, and the other wants to emigrate to Canada. The only constants in Ruben's life are the old family home.
Quotes
edit- As long as the cornerstones of the ideology remain intact—Group Areas, including the splintering of the country into a chequered map of ‘homelands’ and a staggering program of resettlement; separate education systems; the ‘Immorality’ Act; an entire economy based on exploitation —apartheid will persist. What we have seen in recent years has been a modernizing, a sophistication of the system; by no means a development towards its radical destruction
- Page 91
- A neutral grey, containing no color at all and therefore free from any affective influence, while its intensity places it halfway between light and dark so that it gives rise to no anabolic nor catabolic effect- it is psychologically and physiologically neutral
- Page 26
- I wrapped myself in grey sheets of cobwebs and gritty dust
- Page 234
- My library was _ all libraries are _ a place of ultimate refuge, a wild and sacred space where meanings are manageable precisely because they aren’t binding; and where illusion is comfortably real. To read, to think, to trace the words back to their origins real or presumed; to invent; to dare to imagine…. Transport is the business of books, the purpose of my world-without-end.
- Page 32
- is a meeting place, a point of confrontation between the individual and the social
- Speaking on languages that constitutes word is... Page 232
- words do interpose themselves between the world and us; they make us realize how, literally, ‘out of touch’ we are with the real
- Page 114
- [l]iminal space, in-between the designations of identity... opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy
- Page 4
- when a ritual situation immediately succeeds a political situation, the contentious issues raised in the former are kept in abeyance in the latter phase in the social process; the dispute may again attain public status in a new political situation
- Page 240
- It’s a space suspended between land and sea, a connective tissue between two worlds;” it is a space of both relaxation and anxiety, a “…place to retreat from the turmoil of life and threat; unpredictable currents and disturbances may occur there
- Page 354
- I belong to a different world now. I am a stranger to the place that has made me what I am
- Page 102