A Season in Paradise is an exciting, and often amusing, travelogue, recounting the journey the poet made with his Vietnamese wife through the sunlit lands of his youth. He intersperses the narrative with verse, prose-poems, fantasy and political invective. The word-play is often dazzling….

The Afrikaners have an unashamed sentimentality about their own places and people, born of having been a lonely race clinging to the fringe of an alien continent.

In Breytenbach, this simplicity gains a new dimension from his familiarity with writers ranging, quite literally, from China to Peru. A main inspiration has been Rimbaud; like a jewel in the heart of the narrative is a brief 'life' of Rimbaud, the creation of a poet's dreams. Behind everything, a sense of impending doom. Somebody reading this book—written before Breytenbach made his fateful second journey home—should have warned him he was not cut out to...