Dog Heart: A Memoir

‘What I want to write is the penetration, expansion, skirmishing, coupling, mixing, separation, regrouping of peoples and cultures – the glorious bastardization of men and women mutually shaped by sky and rain and wind and soil.’The leading Afrikaaner poet and anti-apartheid campaigner, Breyten Breytenbach returns to South Africa from Parisian exile and finds himself excavating both his family’s history and that of his nation, through a series of contemporary sketches and haunting reminiscences which are highly coloured, strongly poetic, and often unsettling. We encounter the ‘New South Africa’, where efforts at a formal process of Truth and Reconciliation teeter uneasily atop a legacy of terrible and enduring violence.