Breyten Breytenbach is one of the major postwar poets writing in Afrikaans, the language of the Afrikaners, South Africans of Dutch descent. He gained an international reputation with the publication ...
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Critical Essay by Barend J. Toerien
The sensational background of the writing of these poems [Voetskrif]—the self-exiled poet's return to South Africa on a subsequently confessed subver...
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Critical Essay by David Caute
Breytenbach's A Season in Paradise recounts a three-month visit to his native land, following 12 years of exile in Paris, with the elaborate self-consciousness of...
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Critical Essay by Anthony Delius
Much of the latter part of [A Season in Paradise] reads like a Freudian prologue to the disaster that overtook Breytenbach well after it was written, when he went bac...
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Critical Essay by Richard Rathbone
This dense, carefully textured and very personal book [A Season in Paradise] echoes, and its title challenges, Rimbaud's Saison en enfer. For [Breyten Breyte...
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Critical Essay by Sheila Roberts
The full title of [Miernes, a] book of short prose pieces reads "The Antheap Is Swelling Yes the Fox-Terrier Gets a Weekend and Other Almost Forgotten Catastro...
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Critical Essay by AndrÉ P. Brink
Linked to the realities of exile and of Africa, [the poems in Feu froid] are stimulated by sources as divergent as Senghor and Lorca and Neruda, the meditation...
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Critical Essay by Barend J. Toerien
The poems [in Blomskryf: Uit die gedigte van Breyten Breytenbach en Jan Blom] are arranged in two sections: the "how" of poetry—its nature, it...
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Critical Essay by Barend J. Toerien
[Sinking Ship Blues is a collection of Breytenbach's poems and drawings.] The title is somewhat misleading, since these forceful poems cannot be called ...
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Critical Essay by Desmond Graham
Love poems [and poems about politics each] comprise about half the work in the two new translations of the Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach [and death white as word...
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Critical Essay by AndrÉ Brink
In all [Breytenbach's] work the most constant source of inspiration has been Zen Buddhism. As such, it is a dazzling marriage of the real, the ordered, the...
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Critical Essay by Paul Theroux
Using the framework of his return to South Africa after 13 years' absence, Mr. Breytenbach fashions a reminiscence of his childhood with a meditation on the pres...
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Critical Essay by Stanley Uys
There is recurrent morbidity in A Season in Paradise. Describing his childhood, for example, Breytenbach says he fell out of a moving car in front of a farmer's p...
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Critical Essay by Richard Hall
A Season in Paradise is an exciting, and often amusing, travelogue, recounting the journey the poet made with his Vietnamese wife through the sunlit lands of his youth....
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In the following review of In Africa Even the Flies Are Happy: Selected Poems 1964–1977, Des Pres surveys Breytenbach's works and attempts to assess his importance and success as a polit...
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In the following essay, Coetzee examines Breytenbach's notions of self and other in his writings during and after his prison sentence.
One of the major poems in Breyten Breytenbach's ...
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In the following review, Toerien offers a generally positive assessment of Soos die so and finds the writing in All One Horse luminous and reminiscent of South American magical realism.
Breyten Bre...
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In the following review, Berner calls Memory of Snow and of Dust a "remarkable development" in Breytenbach's literary canon.
Since his release from prison, Breyten Breytenbach ...
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In the following essay, Coetzee provides overviews of True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist and Mouroir.
South of the city of Cape Town lies a tranquil, almost rural, suburb named (after the wine...
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In the following review, van Vuuren finds Hart-lam valuable to an understanding of Breytenbach's political and artistic vision.
Breyten Breytenbach is a complex phenomenon: painter, poet, pr...
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In the following review, Freed praises Breytenbach's ability in Return to Paradise to be both evocative and satiric of South Africa and its people.
This wonderful book [Return to Paradise], ...
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In the following review, Coetzee offers praise for Return to Paradise.
In 1960 Breyten Breytenbach left his native South Africa to live in Paris, where he wrote poetry and painted. There he fell in...
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In the following review, Kruper finds the political writing in Return to Paradise somewhat heavy-handed and incoherent but admires Breytenbach's descriptive abilities when he does not discuss p...
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In the following review, Wood and Breytenbach discuss major themes in Return to Paradise.
In 1975, the South African poet and painter Breyten Breytenbach was arrested at the airport at Johannesburg...
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In the following review, Toerien admires Breytenbach's breadth of scope and spontaneity in nege landskappe.
In spite of—understandably—bitter renouncements of his people and co...
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In the following review, Schwartz examines revelations made in Breytenbach's The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist and reflects on his own involvement in the political movement to support...
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In the following review, Bawer finds Breytenbach's search for truth and justice in The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution admirable despite the book's flaws.
In 1991, before the f...
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In the following review, Toerien offers a positive assessment of Die hand vol vere.
A selection of Breyten Breytenbach's poetry made by his friend and academic Ampie Coetzee has the disarmin...
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In the following essay, Roberts discusses Mouroir and The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, both of which Breytenbach wrote during his prison term in South Africa.
It has been said that each...
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In the following review, Toerien calls Breytenbach's Lewendood both "rich and generous" in its poetic intentions.
Breytenbach's fourth published volume of poems written ...
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In the following review, Crapanzano finds End Papers disturbing and somewhat indulgent of Breytenbach's rage against South African apartheid but otherwise worthy of praise.
Breyten Breytenba...
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In the following review, Campbell praises Mouroir and The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist but finds End Papers somewhat self-satisfied and unworthy of publication.
Seven years' impri...
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In the following review, Robbins finds End Papers interesting from the point of view of literary and political history but less compelling than Breytenbach's earlier works.
In 1975, after mo...
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In the following review, Kratz offers high praise for End Papers.
Breyten Breytenbach spent seven years (1975–82) in a South African prison, two of them in solitary confinement, for "...
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In the following review, Mitgang finds universal relevance in the themes relating to injustice in Memory of Snow and of Dust.
In Memory of Snow and of Dust, a follow-up to his searing memoir of his...
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