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 plowshares, which "sliced me up all over the place on my body, but particularly through my neck, so that my head was just left lying there loose to one side. Thus my blood-soaked little body was decapitated, lifeless." Breytenbach then goes on to fantasize a stirringly beautiful funeral service.

The images of South Africa—of friends and familiar places—are vivid. He gazes upon everything with the heightened perception of the artist and leaves the reader to make what he can of it. The facts of Breytenbach's journey … are no more than a point of departure for the real voyage undertaken through landscapes of the mind and memory and fantasy, and through virtuoso flights of fancy in the realms of...