SOURCE: "Thinking Forbidden Thoughts," in Washington Post Book World, Vol. XXVI, May 5, 1996, p. 5.

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 fall of the white deKlerk regime in South Africa, the Afrikaans writer and anti-apartheid revolutionary Breyten Breytenbach—who had spent seven years as a political prisoner and several more years as an exile in Paris—published an open letter to his friend Nelson Mandela, complaining that Mandela's African National Congress should "stop being the victims" and instead assume its proper role as "actors for change and construction." The letter, which appears in his new book, The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution, was typical of Breytenbach (A Season in Paradise, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist). Refusing to play the martyr or to idealize...