SOURCE: Review of End Papers, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 17, 1986, pp. 1, 9.

In the following review, Crapanzano finds End Papers disturbing and somewhat indulgent of Breytenbach's rage against South African apartheid but otherwise worthy of praise.

Breyten Breytenbach is a South African poet, painter and political activist. An Afrikaner by birth (though he refuses to be identified with the Afrikaners because of the political implications of such an identification). Breytenbach committed, in his people's eyes, the unpardonable crime. He sought to overthrow, violently if necessary, the South African government and the monstrous edifice of apartheid it had constructed. Breytenbach was arrested, tried, and imprisoned for seven years—two in solitary confinement—before he was released in 1982. (He has described these years of imprisonment in two books, Mouroir and The Confessions of an Albino Terrorist.) The miscellaneous writings collected in End Papers were written before and after his...