Return to Paradise

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Breyten Breytenbach is one of South Africa's foremost but for years he has had a complex and painful relationship with his home country. In 1973, after thirteen years in exile, he was permitted a three-month visit there. A Season in Paradise, the first part of his triptych about South Africa, is an account of that bittersweet trip: "A spiritual journey, an earthly travelog, a poet's chronicle of his soul, the mythic biography of a country, an exotic picture album, a revolutionary treatise, a wrenching lament for ...
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10/1/1993 Hardcover New 0151770867 Excellent condition, hardback 1993 FIRST UNITED STATES EDITION, no marks, great cover, slt fray dust jacket, readit VG+/VG.

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More About This Book

Overview

Breyten Breytenbach is one of South Africa's foremost but for years he has had a complex and painful relationship with his home country. In 1973, after thirteen years in exile, he was permitted a three-month visit there. A Season in Paradise, the first part of his triptych about South Africa, is an account of that bittersweet trip: "A spiritual journey, an earthly travelog, a poet's chronicle of his soul, the mythic biography of a country, an exotic picture album, a revolutionary treatise, a wrenching lament for a dying species, the book is all of these" (Andrei Codrescu).

In 1975, Breytenbach returned to South Africa illegally. He was arrested, tried for "terrorism, " and served seven years in prison, two of them in solitary confinement. On his release, he recounted his harrowing experiences in The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist: "It is a reasonable metaphor to describe this book as an explosive device ticking away at the very foundations of the idea of a white nationalism in Africa" (The New York Times Book Review, front page).

In 1991, after Nelson Mandela had been freed and the ban on the African National Congress (ANC) had been lifted, Breytenbach returned to South Africa for yet another three-month-long foray. For his account of that third trip, Return to Paradise, he was awarded the prestigious Alan Paton Prize.

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Editorial Reviews

Hazel Rochman
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."
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780151770861
  • Publisher: Harcourt
  • Publication date: 11/1/1993
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 224
  • Product dimensions: 5.79 (w) x 8.54 (h) x 1.04 (d)

Table of Contents

Some People, Organizations and Terms Appearing in the Text
Preface
1 Votum 1
2 Entry 4
3 Beginning 11
4 Mountain 24
5 Northwards 33
6 Blow-hole 46
7 Shadow 66
8 Purpura 88
9 Moon 102
10 Peregrinus 121
11 Night 138
12 Protyle 147
13 Fireknow 158
14 Oasis 163
15 Guide 174
16 Phakathi! 182
17 Aorist 189
18 Snake 192
19 Blood 200
20 Dance! 208
21 Departure 214
22 The Contaminated Heart 217
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