Mouroir [Paperback]

Breytenbach composed this docu-dream during a period of incarceration. Mouroir (mourir: to die + miroir: mirror) is a ship of thought moving with its own hallucinatory logic through a sea of mythic images, protean characters and what the author describes as landscapes and spaces beyond death, spaces that have always existed and will always exist. An Orphic voyage into memory and mirage, through passages between death and life, darkness and light, oppression and flight, sense and the sensed. Mouroir.Yet this is not a prisoner's book. It would be a crass injustice of underestimation and simplification if it is presented and received that way. It describes how the ordinary time-focus of a man's perceptions can be extraordinarily rearranged by a definitive experience… Prison irradiates this book with dreadful enlightenments; the dark and hidden places of the country from which the book arises are phosphorescent with it. Breytenbach is a writer who carries his whole life with him, all the time . . . and who possesses a creative ability equal to his experience. His imagery is so exquisite, chilling, aphoristic, witty, that one is reminded how that ancient and most beautiful attribute of writing has fallen into desuetude in prose. —Nadine Gordimer

Mouroir is a complex, demanding, haunting book. It stands as a brief for the act of writing, writing as an exercise of imagination and will . . . the blend between fantasy and reality, the lyric intensity of a narrative consciousness which refuses to be pinned down to one identity or a single mode of existence. —John Edgar WidemanAn outspoken human rights activist, Breyten Breytenbach is a poet, painter, memoirist, essayist and novelist. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited around the world. Born in South Africa, he emigrated to Paris in the late ’60s and became deeply involved in the anti-Apartheid movement. Author of &ll“(