All One Horse [Paperback]

All One Horse is a marvel-filled journey through Breyten Breytenbach’s kaleidoscopic imagination. The electrifying colors and penetrating images of his paintings converse with his lyrical and satirical dream-fables. These visions and parables emerge from a mélange of cultures and traditions: African and Eastern thought, the spirit world, and the spheres of visual art, philosophy, history and politics. Breytenbach’s watercolors communicate in hieroglyphs, where private conversation embraces myth and dream. These reflections and images – clear and complex at once – are cries for human dignity and justice, are truth disguised as play. With octopus-like grace, Breytenbach pulls together worlds and watches them dance and struggle together; echoes of Afrikaans haunt his English, the fantastic melds into the quotidian, love glimmers beneath rage, the immediate rises to the universal.Here is a bargain: the two astonishing talents of Breyten Breytenbach for the price of one, beautifully gift-wrapped free of charge. Sharp words in terse sentences compose brief fables to accompany lovely grotesque allegorical images, often of men with inquiring penises. A book that makes you want to get spanked.—William Gass

An immensely gifted writer, able to descend effortlessly into the Africa of the poetic unconscious and return with the rhythm and the words, the words in the rhythm that give life. —J.M. Coetzee

Breytenbach’s passionate desire to know and serve the truth, whatever it may be and whomever it may offend, is deeply admirable. —The Washington Post

It is impossible to stop our ears against the excruciating power of what Breytenbach has to say. —Nadine Gordimer

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