The full title of [Miernes, a] book of short prose pieces reads "The Antheap Is Swelling Yes the Fox-Terrier Gets a Weekend and Other Almost Forgotten Catastrophes and Fragments from Old Manuscripts of Breyten Breytenbach" (my translation), a title which conveys something of the humor, absurdity and anti-narrative techniques explored in these stories…. The collection starts off lightheartedly enough in the section "Antheap," where the poet rides through Paris on a motorcycle, meeting two funny Dutch poets and a pretty woman but also nearly colliding with a gang of convicts whose bleeding legs are chained together. Such touches of human cruelty (or selfishness or irrationality) darken the burlesque or dreamlike moods of most of the pieces….

There is a parable-like quality to some of the stories, particularly to "Punishable Innocence," in which a man, touring what seems a medieval castle with his wife and brother and sister, is...