Using the framework of his return to South Africa after 13 years' absence, Mr. Breytenbach fashions a reminiscence of his childhood with a meditation on the present. ["A Season in Paradise"] is a teeming narrative, because no idea and hardly a sentence is uttered before it is overtaken by a new thought or impression. This is a technique favored by painters (I have not seen Mr. Breytenbach's paintings, but I would guess they are big and bright), but it nearly always brings a prose writer to grief. Joyousness is hard to describe in whimsically deranged language, and so much of this book is personal that one feels more like an eavesdropper than a reader. (pp. 8-9)

At times Mr. Breytenbach seems to typify one definition of a pessimist: that is, an optimist in full possession of the facts. And he is never more innocent or naïvely grave than...