SOURCE: "Resisters," in New York Review of Books, Vol. XL, No. 20, December 2, 1993, pp. 3-6.

In the following review, Coetzee offers praise for Return to Paradise.

In 1960 Breyten Breytenbach left his native South Africa to live in Paris, where he wrote poetry and painted. There he fell in love with and married a woman of Vietnamese descent. Interracial marriages being illegal in the South Africa of those days, he could not return home with his wife; he refused to return without her.

In 1972, in a gesture of conciliation toward the Afrikaans intellectual community, which was troubled by such treatment of a man who had in the meantime become widely acknowledged as the leading poet of his generation, the South African government granted Breytenbach and his wife visas for a brief visit. During this visit Breytenbach gave an uncompromising address at a writers' conference: it is because Afrikaners are a...