This dense, carefully textured and very personal book [A Season in Paradise] echoes, and its title challenges, Rimbaud's Saison en enfer. For [Breyten Breytenbach,] the Afrikaner radical poet, paradise is friends, family and the breathtaking physical beauty of South Africa. That paradise is located, paradoxically, in a hell of repression and inhumanity. That apparent contradiction is the sort of dyadic opposition he delights [in] in all his work; his pleasure in discovering an Elysian valley north of Calitzdorp which is actually called Hell falls conveniently in the middle of this book.

This is not a work of fiction nor is it quite a work of fact. The green paradise of childhood loves which he had conjured in exile was real to him just as surely as it was an artifact. Many of the people in the book are also real although he loves concealing them, especially when he...