Breytenbach's A Season in Paradise recounts a three-month visit to his native land, following 12 years of exile in Paris, with the elaborate self-consciousness of an avant-garde prizewinner who had become the golden boy of the Sestiger movement in Afrikaans literature….

When not wilfully obscure or impenetrable, Breytenbach … tends to carry elaborate irony to the point of overkill. (p. 20)

BB is a much better poet than prose writer. At his best when describing the famished existence of Boer farmers eking a living out of the drought-stricken veld, BB elsewhere shelters behind a series of derivative postures plucked with a vast and vulgar eclecticism from Lorca, Artaud, Neruda, the cadences of negritude, from Lautréamont and Rimbaud, from Hieronymous Bosch and Zen Buddhism. An Afrikaner Beat.

BB seems to regard the racism of the Dutch Reformed Church as a form of anal repression. He consistently farts in its face; in...