The Memory of Birds in Time of Revolution - Hardcover

Breytenbach, Breyten

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151001685 ISBN 13: 9780151001682

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996

Synopsis

The Memory of Birds in Time Revolutions is a collection of searching new essays by the acclaimed author of Returen to Paradise and True Confessions of an Albion Terrorist. Essaying his homeland, Africa, at the end of the twentieth century, Breyten Breytenbach offers penetrating insights on a variety of topics: the release of Nelson Mandela from prison ("Nelson Mandela is Free"); the early days of Mandela's presidency, and its failures (the controversial "Open Letter to Nelson Mandela"); the geography of the writer's imagination ("Tortoise Steps"); death as the mother of beauty ("Cadavre Exquis"); the true meaning of reconciliation and reform after apartheid ("Fragments from a Growing Awareness of Unfinished Truths"); and much more.

About this title

About the Author

BREYTEN BREYTENBACH was born in Bonnievale, South Africa, and currently divides his time between France, Spain, Senegal, and New York City. He teaches in the Creative Writing Department at New York University.

Reviews

This miscellany of recent essays and lectures by Afrikaner renegade Breytenbach does not have the sustained brilliance of such soul-and nation-searching memoirs as Return to Paradise, but his musings about art and politics express doubt, responsibility and wonder. He reminds a European audience how apartheid "flows from our shared history." Refusing to play the victimized exile, he claims he is through with politics; however, he also includes respectfully critical "open letters" to Nelson Mandela (in 1991 and 1994) and a lecture in which he warned the new government about its hegemonic bent. "Exile has brought it home to me that I'm African," Breytenbach declares, and his patriotism is shaped by anguish and a sense of urgency regarding a world that ignores his homeland. A devolutionist democrat in politics and an individualist in culture, even when fanciful or obscure, he writes in passionate, poetic language. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Breytenbach is about as extreme an outsider as it's possible to be--an Afrikaner writer and poet, jailed for terrorism against apartheid, visiting South Africa now from exile in Paris, still a stranger ("I find myself nowhere now" ). In this collection of recent essays and speeches, his subject is writing and politics, especially in Africa. His persona is outrageous and uncertain. He is as insulting about the halls of academia as he is about the "mink and manure suburbs" and the noble writers "fattened on protest." The trouble is he's also self-conscious and self-important, heavy with the very rhetoric he attacks in political leaders. The elusive sense of place that humanized his last great book, Return to Paradise (1993), is replaced here with abstraction and clotted prose. Even his "Open Letter to Nelson Mandela" is preachy, vague, meandering. Yet, it's hard not to hear him. He's most eloquent when he's self-doubting, antiheroic. He speaks for our times in his call for "the transforming art of remembering," his insistence that suffering does not ennoble. Hazel Rochman

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151001685
• ISBN 13: 9780151001682
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 169