Written in the last years of the author's life, the stories may at first seem morbid and obsessive. And yet, by the force of Herling's perfectly poised, dispassionate, Stendhalian prose, they show something beautiful, even uplifting in those parables about people at their limits, plunged in total isolation, where they have to decide whether to reject life or to affirm it despite it all. In the face of these two possibilities, the narrative voice remains detached and unprejudiced. Yet the author also lets us know that he would rather stand with those who reach the finish with unconditional defiance. "When it comes down to it, what is hope?" asks Herling, a former prisoner, soldier, exile and witness to his century. "Impotent rebellion against despair. Whoever says that one can't live without hope is simply asserting that one cannot live without constant rebellion."

-- Jaroslaw Anders

*The Other Side of Silence

A Novel

Andre Brink

Harcourt: 312 pp., $25

In 1904-07, the Hereros and other natives of German Southwest Africa revolted against their colonial masters. The Germans brought in Gen. Lothar von Trotha, who, as Thomas Pynchon dryly recounts in his novel "V.," had demonstrated "a certain expertise in suppressing pigmented populations." Von Trotha ordered the extermination of every Herero man, woman and child his troops could find. He "is reckoned to have done away with about 60,000 people," Pynchon says. "This is only 1 percent of 6 million, but still pretty good."

Such atrocities, which prefigure those of the Nazis and of the apartheid regime South African writer Andre Brink spent much of his career protesting against, are the background for Brink's latest novel, "The Other Side of Silence." The heroine, Hanna X, arrives in the colony in 1902 aboard one of the ships that supplied single German women to its sex-starved soldiers, prospectors and farmers. An orphan, intelligent but plain, beaten down by a childhood of abuse and by housemaid jobs that amounted to indentured servitude, Hanna believes she has nothing to lose by emigrating.

Brink's last novel, "The Rights of Desire," had an elderly hero and an autumnal tone, but there's nothing geriatric about "The Other Side of Silence," in which Hanna, who learned strategy by playing chess with one of her less odious employers in Bremen, is forced to face the moral dilemma of every revolutionary: How can she fight evil without becoming evil herself? This bloody fable, rooted in bloody reality, is one of Brink's most powerful works.