SOURCE: "A Poet's Obsession with Apartheid," in New York Times Book Review, November 4, 1989, p. 15.

In the following review, Mitgang finds universal relevance in the themes relating to injustice in Memory of Snow and of Dust.

In Memory of Snow and of Dust, a follow-up to his searing memoir of his seven years in a South African prison on a trumped-up charge of terrorism, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Breyten Breytenbach continues his campaign of conscience against apartheid. This time Mr. Breytenbach puts a novelistic stamp on his work. Using the freedom made possible by fiction, the self-exiled Afrikaner poet, painter and translator reaches still deeper into his past, recalling aspects of his torture, trial and imprisonment. And he reminds the reader that apartness can be a fact of life even in Paris, that city of light and enlightenment where he now makes his home.

In Memory...