I bought the book at Johannesburg airport. The blurb said, “A writer at the top of his craft. I’ve often wondered when a craft becomes art, in any case André Brink’s book called, Before I Forget is superbly written. It is a thinly veiled autobiography, the writer does not use his own name in the book, maybe it could be called a selective memoir.

 It is his attempt to isolate the determining influences in his life; in his case, these all happen to be women. Not only do they have a determining influence on his life, but it is through them, and particularly through his sexual relations with them, that he attempts to get to some type of truth, about life itself and how to make sense of something that is, with our limited capacity, meaningless.

It is a continual frustration, the need to attach some importance, beyond the biological wish to stay alive, to something which, no matter how we look at it, can be termed meaningless. Of course, religion may help people. Many religions describe the importance of individual life to God but, possibly, one needs to be very imaginative or just lazy to want to have the fantastic mystery of life packaged in such, very often, ridiculous stories.

Brink suggests that the sexual act and the moment of ‘going outside of himself’ in that most sensual of moments – that moment of total exchange , is the closest one might get to knowing a kind of truth about oneself and what it is to be human.

J.M. Coetzee his friend and contemporary took a took a diametrically opposite point of view