Dog Heart: A Travel Memoir

by Breyten Breytenbach

'What I want to write is the penetration, expansion, skirmishing, coupling, mixing, separation, regrouping of peoples and cultures - the glorious bastardization of men and women mutually shaped by sky and rain and wind and soil.'The leading Afrikaaner poet and anti-apartheid campaigner, Breyten Breytenbach returns to South Africa from Parisian exile and finds himself excavating both his family's history and that of his nation, through a series of contemporary sketches and haunting reminiscences which are highly coloured, strongly poetic, and often unsettling. We encounter the 'New South Africa', where efforts at a formal process of Truth and Reconciliation teeter uneasily atop a legacy of terrible and enduring violence.

Genres: South Africa

Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Breyten Breytenbach was a South African writer, poet, and painter. He became internationally well-known as a dissident poet and vocal critic of South Africa under apartheid, and as a political prisoner of the National Party-led South African Government. He is also known as a founding member of the Sestigers, a dissident literary movement, and was one of the most important living poets in Afrikaans literature.

Reviews

[Marion Roux]

This is a very poetic memoir and his thoughts of growing up in the area of Bonnievale and Barrydale (Western Cape, South Africa).
I enjoyed reading of the history of the places, the townsfolk, present and past, and his escapades as a lad. But enjoyed less so the "Memory" chapters

[Jeremy]

A memoir of time spent in the New South Africa. Very poetic. Really brings out the attachment of the Afrikaner to the land. But so much violence

[Daisygirl825]

Couldn’t finish. Hard to read and boring.