SOURCE: Review of Memory of Snow and of Dust, in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 1, Winter 1991, pp. 175-76.

In the following review, Berner calls Memory of Snow and of Dust a "remarkable development" in Breytenbach's literary canon.

Since his release from prison, Breyten Breytenbach has returned to Paris, resumed his career as a distinguished Afrikaans poet, and begun to write in English. An introductory poem in Memory of Snow and Dust says that "the biography I am … writing is always [a] book of myself." We are tempted, therefore, to look for autobiographical analogies in the novel, which deals with a South African in Paris who is arrested when he returns to South Africa on behalf of his political party and also with a South African writer who has exiled himself to Paris after serving a prison term. Such an approach, however, does not begin to take account of...