SOURCE: "Conspicuous Exile," in New York Times Book Review, Vol. XCI, No. 48, November 30, 1986, p. 21.

In the following review, Robbins finds End Papers interesting from the point of view of literary and political history but less compelling than Breytenbach's earlier works.

In 1975, after more than a decade of exile in Paris, the "whitish" (his term) Afrikaans-speaking poet and painter Breyten Breytenbach returned to South Africa incognito in order to help organize white resistance to apartheid. Arrested and convicted, he spent seven years in prison, two of them in solitary confinement. It is probably thanks to this involuntary sojourn—a story told with freshness and modesty in The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1985)—that we now have End Papers, a collection of 50-odd addresses, analyses, poetico-political fragments and essays by Mr. Breytenbach, together with extensive notes on their occasions.

International publicity helped get the author out of prison, and...