Return to Paradise - Hardcover

Breytenbach, Breyten

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151770867 ISBN 13: 9780151770861

Publisher: Harcourt, 1993

Synopsis

The painter, writer, and political activist returns to his native South Africa, where he was once imprisoned for working for the African National Congress, and reflects on the decline of apartheid and his own attachment to the Boer state

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Reviews

In lush, poetic, sometimes brutal imagery, Afrikaner painter, poet and anti-apartheid activist Breytenbach ( A Season in Paradise , etc.) describes the travail of his country riven by racial conflict. He recounts his seven-year imprisonment for treason and shares the passionate love of an exile--he resides in Paris--for his native land. In the recent period of "stability laced with blood" as De Klerk and Mandela's forces struggle to maintain a precarious political equilibrium, Breytenbach has been allowed to return for visits with his Vietnamese wife. Part travelogue and part memoir, this account offers frequent political discussions about the rivalry between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party. A careful observer of people, their surroundings, fauna and flora, Breytenbach weaves richly colored narrative history, local lore and personal allusions. Author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In what is developing as a series of journals of visits back home to South Africa (A Season in Paradise, 1980, recounted a secret incursion in 1974), Paris-based Afrikaans poet and activist ex-prisoner Breytenbach (Memory of Snow and Dust, 1989, etc.) here faces a homeland that now will admit him but that quivers with apprehension, where change is not close to jelling. Mandela is back on the scene, de Klerk has succeeded the jackboot Botha regime, and new possibilities seem to be in the wind. But possibilities are not structures, and Breytenbach is cleareyed enough to see orthodoxies reasserting themselves under different names. The ANC already appears to him top-heavy with nomenklatura; and while much white posturing is going on, white comprehension joins it rarely. As ever, Breytenbach's style is gauzy, poetic, and in the end a roadblock (``Before we didn't know of the existence of death, then we saw ducks copulating like the two hands of an old man trying to remember the art of forgetting, and we saw how the trees were black with fruit. The human being is destructive matter. The brief flame of knowing. Homo detritus. Carrion. My hands are rotting in Africa. The writer as destroyer of infinity''). It's a shame, too--for in his jaundiced eye, much that's valuable is registered (there's a revealing tableau, for instance, of Mandela during a state visit to France), a feeling for the African continent that's truly profound. But it's muddied nearly the whole way through by the impressionism and cockading stylistic swirls. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The radical Afrikaans writer who spent seven years in prison in South Africa for terrorism now lives in exile in Paris with his Vietnamese wife. Here he describes his 1991 three-month return journey to South Africa to lecture, travel, see friends and family, and take part in the debate on the future. He finds himself, as always, "a foreigner at home." Once an ANC activist, he rejoices at Mandela's release, but he's heartbroken to find a land awash in blood. Looping back in time and place from Paris to West Africa to Pretoria and Cape Town, he sometimes gets lost in detail, but he reaches from the immediate and political to the surrealist images in all our dreams. With raging fury, he attacks the apartheid killers, but his prose becomes plain and quiet when he writes with almost unbearable tenderness of his late father ("I remember the rhythm but not the words"). In the landscape he can't forget, the names of places become a litany. There's no self-importance or heroics: his surprise encounter in a roadhouse with his prison torturer leaves him shaken with impotent rage and terror. A lesser writer would have exploited the drama of the confrontation; Breytenbach makes it almost bathetic. He knows only that, like cockroaches, the evil will survive all cataclysms. He's a drifter, a nomad. With echoes of Eliot, he hears "the tragic mumbling of the broken waves at night." Hazel Rochman

Breytenbach, who describes himself as "an Afrikaans-speaking whitish male South African African temporarily living outside the continent," has written about his earlier experiences in A Season in Paradise ( LJ 4/15/80) and The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1983). The current work is an intensely personal reflection centered on a three-month visit to South Africa in 1991. Breytenbach does not pretend to have any understanding of what will ultimately happen in South Africa, but with his insider/outsider status, he offers an unusual perspective on the country and the continent, locales, and personalities. These are the subjective, opinionated musings of a brilliant intellectual, and if some references to lesser-known places and people are hard to put in context, Breytenbach still rewards his readers. Well recommended.
- William R. Smith, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151770867
• ISBN 13: 9780151770861
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224