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 phophorescent with it.

A complex, demanding, haunting book… 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.

Mouroir might be seen as a novel, a series of stories, essays, prose poems, philosophical reflections, notes, or fragments, but is at the same time none of these things. Indeed, the power of this book, written by South African writer Breytenbach when he was imprisoned for seven years, lies in just that: these are pieces that cannot be pinned down. Here, the boundaries between the real and the magical are blurry, here the poetic and the lyrical can draw abruptly up into something painfully real.

It resembles, I imagine, the incarceration experience in being downbeat, inky and gloomy, yet being a place, judging by the incandescence of the author’s prose, where the imagination can soar on untrammeled flights.

If you enjoy artistic writing, poetic prose and an author who writes with a voice full of wisdom then for you Mouroir is a must read.

The dreams, the symbols have the DNA of communal memory. They are drawn from the same fountain that inspired The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland and, yes, the Greek myths. Breytenbach has traveled to the place where stories are made and returned with a great big bag full.