Having moved from Africa to New York I miss the lyrical poetry of Breyten as much as sunsets, dust and moskonfyt. A true South African hero and visionary he deserves the every accolade. I wish more readers could read him in Afrikaans, the language in which his poetry is elevated to the sublime.

This book is a worthy complement to Coetzee's Disgrace. Breytenbach is a writer and poet with a fine delicate sensibility. Not an easy read, the book is nonetheless fascinating, beautiful and horrifying in turn. He meditates on his childhood in the Boland area of the Cape, and the history of his Afrikaans speaking family in the area. He describes the brutality that happened in SA in the past and that happens in present day SA frankly and bluntly. He tells it how it is and and sometimes as I read it my blood just ran cold. He also describes the beauty of the country, the land and its animals, plants and trees, the night sky, the clouds etc. The subject matter is very interesting and the quality of his writing is superb. I have never read anything by this writer before and I was surprised by the brilliance of it. I found it very moving and profound. It is a stunning book.

In this brief but brilliant book, the South African writer Breyten Breytenbach (who wrote poems in Afrikaans in the 1960s and then moved on to painting and to writing most of his stories and novels directly in English) presents the reader with short narratives and watercolours. There is an equal number of texts and images.

The texts can be either read as short stories or as prose poems. The title of each text is the last line or the last phrase of the text. Readers familiar with Breytenbach's metaphorical and (to some extent) allegorical universe won't be surprised with the stories, though the phrasings and the arty rhythmical intricacies are at their most consummate and their most enigmatic here.

It is difficult to take the watercolours separately from the texts, because they are obviously meant to be "read" together with the stories. There are echoes between most of the situations that can be found in the narratives and the recurrent motifs that give depth to the watercolours.

Breytenbach is a deliberately and extremely figurative artist. His practice is very different from the general tendency to more and more abstraction.

And yet, the paintings are also fully post-modern. Literally speaking, the watercolours are amazing; we are lost in some kind of labyrinth, where enigmas seem to be impossible to solve. The same motifs keep coming back (pens, brushes, horse-shaped animals) but, instead of providing clear-cut links with either the stories or the similar motifs in other paintings, the recurrent motifs are confusing. In fact, Breytenbach demonstrates superbly the power of illusion: small details can be apprehended separately but can never really make a whole. The search for unity or homogeneity is but a mere illusion: variety and versatility ensure creative as well as political freedom.

Everything is the same ("all one horse"), except when it isn't.

Weschler is a brilliant and amazing storyteller. I had followed his work closely in the New Yorker and other publications. Written like a novel, this book is a fascinating true-life look at three totalitarian regimes through the eyes of exiles who fought dictators in their own ways. The juxtoposition of the threee unrelated experiences provides some interesting insights into what totalitarianism is at its root and how it affects the people who live under its governance.