All One Horse

by Breyten Breytenbach

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781935744252
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	03/22/2011
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	115
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

An 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 Mouroir, A Season in Paradise, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Dog Heart, The Memory of Birds in Times of Revo- lution, A Veil of Footsteps, among many others, Breytenbach received the Alan Paton Award for Return to Paradise in 1994 and the prestigious Hertzog Prize for Poetry for Papierblom in 1999 and for Die Windvanger (Windcatcher) in 2008.

Read an Excerpt

In the beginning there is God. Or Creative Principle. If we take it that there must be a start and a stop, then there should be some entity to begin with or who/which can make the beginning begin? But we are not there yet so there can be no if. If comes later. Let’s start all over again.
In the beginning there is the Word. (This is plagiarism.) Who writes the Word? Ah! Read for Word a synonym for creative act. You have to leave room for assumptions. If you don’t leave room nothing can be created, not even Nothing. If you leave room for synonyms you have a splitting of cells, procreation, multiplication, a filling of the Void. Where the Void comes from? It is in the nature of the Void neither to come nor to go. And I don’t know who you are. Not yet. Don’t leave the room!
(But if I am it must be because you are, my brother. And since there’s a consciousness conscious of its being in the act of searching for synonyms, it must be an I. If the looking is written down it must emanate from a First

Editorial Reviews

South African poet Breytenbach (True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist) offers a dreamy take on the artistic impulse in these 27 short prose fictions. Many are slyly couched as fables; each has a facing page watercolor in Breytenbach's own hand. The poet's role-as the book's consistent speaker notes in "This Unmemorable Memory Exists!"-is like that of a tree: to create a space, to consecrate absence, to be "a place where oblivion could be predicated and practiced endlessly." In "Between the Legs," the narrator finds "God is Word or Flesh or some such"; repeatedly uses the Holocaust codeword Sonderbehandlüng(it's not translated, but it means "special handling"); and ends by noting "God 'is a Brazilian'." Near book's end, in "Bathed in Tears," the speaker confronts an imposter brother-who may be a symbol of artistic fraudulence-with a knife and tries to skin his hands. Surreal and opaque, Breytenbach's self-described "minor" squibs on where art comes from (written in the mid-1980s and seeing their first U.S. publication) are equal parts violence and whimsy. (Sept.)

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Publishers Weekly

Breytenbach is renowned both as an outstanding poet and essayist and as a leading Afrikaner opponent of the apartheid movement. The 27 snippets collected here rarely contain much in the way of character, dialog, or plot; often seem like surreal essays; and sometimes read like poetry. While some pieces are overtly political, most are philosophical explorations of the human imagination. They are accompanied by 27 watercolors by Breytenbach, some reminiscent of Chagall or Gauguin, which are every bit as surreal as the "stories." They are captivating in and of themselves but do not seem to have much relation to the texts. While this collection may attract a small cult of sophisticated readers, most libraries would be better advised to purchase Breytenbach's poetry or essays, such as True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984) or The Memory of Birds in Time of Revolution (1996). Recommended for larger academic and public libraries and especially for Afrikaner collections.
—Jim Dwyer

Library Journal

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

[Return to Paradise] is written with a wild heart and an unrelenting eye, and is fueled by the sort of rage that produces great literature. —The Washington Post

No white South African writer has penetrated as deeply into his own country as Breytenbach—and none has been as successful in the flowering of his art in exile. —Donald Woods

From the Publisher