All One Horse

Published: September 2008

Paperback ISBN: 9780979333071

Ebook ISBN: 9781935744252

All One Horse is a moving and haunting journey through Breyten Breytenbach’s kaleidoscopic imagination. Breytenbach’s electric watercolor 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. With octopus-like grace, Breytenbach braids the traditions 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.

With 27 watercolor illustrations

A moving and haunting journey through Breyten Breytenbach’s kaleidoscopic imagination. The electrifying colors and penetrating images of his paintings converse with his lyrical and satirical dream-fables.

“Obviously the greatest Afrikaner poet of his generation… No one elevated the Boer language to such pure beauty and no one wielded it so devastatingly against the apartheid regime as its exiled poet Breyten Breytenbach.”
—The New Yorker

“As a writer, Breytenbach has the gift of being 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, New York Review of Books

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

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Praise

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

— Nadine Gordimer

Obviously the greatest Afrikaner poet of his generation … No one elevated the Boer language to such pure beauty and no one wielded it so devastatingly against the apartheid regime as its exiled poet Breyten Breytenbach.

— The New Yorker

As a writer, Breytenbach has the gift of being 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, New York Review of Books

[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