All One Horse [Paperback]

Breyten Breytenbach (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2008

“It is impossible to stop our ears against the excruciating power of what Breytenbach has to say.”––Nadine Gordimer

“Obviously the greatest Afrikaner poet of this generation. . . . No one elevated the Boer language to such pure beauty and no one wielded it so devastatingly against the apartheid regime as its exiled poet Breyten Breytenbach.”–The New Yorker

All One Horse is a moving and haunting journey through Breyten Breytenbach’s kaleidoscopic imagination. His surreal and psychically charged paintings converse with his philosophical and lyrical prose pieces. The title is a nod to Chuang Tzu, and the writings are infused with glimmers of Eastern thought (as well as glimmers of the other worlds Breytenbach has inhabited).

An outspoken human rights activist, Breyten Breytenbach is a poet, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and painter (his paintings and drawings have been exhibited around the world). After years of exile in France, in 1975 he was apprehended during a clandestine trip to South Africa, accused of terrorism for his anti-apartheid activities, and spent seven years in prison. He received the Alan Paton Non-Fiction Award for Return to Paradise in 1994 and the Hertzog Prize for poetry in 1999 and 2007.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

South African poet Breytenbach (True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist) offers a dreamy take on the artistic impulse in these 27 short prose fictions. Many are slyly couched as fables; each has a facing page watercolor in Breytenbach's own hand. The poet's role—as the book's consistent speaker notes in This Unmemorable Memory Exists!—is like that of a tree: to create a space, to consecrate absence, to be a place where oblivion could be predicated and practiced endlessly. In Between the Legs, the narrator finds God is Word or Flesh or some such; repeatedly uses the Holocaust codeword Sonderbehandlüng (it's not translated, but it means special handling); and ends by noting God 'is a Brazilian'. Near book's end, in Bathed in Tears, the speaker confronts an imposter brother—who may be a symbol of artistic fraudulence—with a knife and tries to skin his hands. Surreal and opaque, Breytenbach's self-described minor squibs on where art comes from (written in the mid-1980s and seeing their first U.S. publication) are equal parts violence and whimsy. (Sept.) ""
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Review

“No white South African writer has penetrated as deeply into his own country as Breytenbach—and none has been as successful in the flowering of his art in exile.”—Donald Woods

"Breytenbach's passionate desire to know and serve the truth, whatever it may be and whoever it may offend, is deeply admirable."
—The Washington Post

"As a writer, Breytenbach has the gift of being able to descend effortlessly into the Africa of the poetic unconscious and return with the rhythm and the words, the words in the rhythm, that give life."
—J.M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 115 pages
• Publisher: Archipelago Books; First North American Edition edition (September 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0979333075
• ISBN-13: 978-0979333071
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 6.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,934,951 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Figurative and innovative, December 4, 1998

By 

G. Cingal ([e-mail]) (Paris, France) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All one horse: Fictions and images (Paperback)

In this brief but brilliant book, the South African writer Breyten Breytenbach (who wrote poems in Afrikaans in the 1960s and then moved on to painting and to writing most of his stories and novels directly in English) presents the reader with short narratives and watercolours. There is an equal number of texts and images.

The texts can be either read as short stories or as prose poems. The title of each text is the last line or the last phrase of the text. Readers familiar with Breytenbach's metaphorical and (to some extent) allegorical universe won't be surprised with the stories, though the phrasings and the arty rhythmical intricacies are at their most consummate and their most enigmatic here.

It is difficult to take the watercolours separately from the texts, because they are obviously meant to be "read" together with the stories. There are echoes between most of the situations that can be found in the narratives and the recurrent motifs that give depth to the watercolours.

Breytenbach is a deliberately and extremely figurative artist. His practice is very different from the general tendency to more and more abstraction.

And yet, the paintings are also fully post-modern. Literally speaking, the watercolours are amazing; we are lost in some kind of labyrinth, where enigmas seem to be impossible to solve. The same motifs keep coming back (pens, brushes, horse-shaped animals) but, instead of providing clear-cut links with either the stories or the similar motifs in other paintings, the recurrent motifs are confusing. In fact, Breytenbach demonstrates superbly the power of illusion: small details can be apprehended separately but can never really make a whole. The search for unity or homogeneity is but a mere illusion: variety and versatility ensure creative as well as political freedom.

Everything is the same ("all one horse"), except when it isn't.