Dog Heart: A Memoir - Hardcover

Breytenbach, Breyten

3.62

34 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151004587 ISBN 13: 9780151004584

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999

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Breyten Breytenbach's meditations are informed by a profound intelligence and wit and an overriding sense of the past. He is captivated by memories of the land that is no more, of the child he must have been. Breytenbach begins Dog Heart with his own beginning in Bonnievale, South Africa, and looks at his homeland through the prism of memory to uncover a new landscape. We read of the ouvolk, the moon and stars and trees and shrubs and rocks that are really petrified shamans, subterranean travelers, death dancers who change themselves into rocks to become invisible to those who invade the land. Then over time they forget to change back. Through searching honesty and dreamlike lyricism, Breytenbach raises the memoir to a new level.

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About the Author:

Breyten Breytenbach was born in Bonnievale, South Africa, in 1939. In the late sixties, he joined the exiled activists of the African National Congress in Paris. In 1975, he was caught in South Africa and sentenced to nine years in prison. He was released in 1982 and returned to Paris. He has written numerous works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

From Kirkus Reviews:

An obsessive, passionate memoir of the African National Congress activist and author, which is steeped in violence, haunted by memory, and throbbing with the dangers and possibilities of language. Breytenbach (The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution: Essays, 1996, etc.) joined the exiled African National Congress in Paris in the late '60s. He was caught in South Africa in 1975, and sentenced to nine years in prison, of which he served seven. His memoir is an attempt to work through the destructive and creative processes of memory, which both create us as individuals and define us as communitiesa particularly timely theme for a South Africa undergoing the painful healing brought on by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Breytenbach begins by announcing that he is dead and continuously makes connections between death, writing, and the imagination. Memory is the process of uncovering new landscapes, which always involves the destruction of the previous oneshe figures the violence associated with the process in the recurrent image of an angry dog with blood-covered teeth. He repeatedly cautions us that our memories are constantly being mixed with those of others, and we must be careful which stories we choose to listen to. The theoretical aspects of the memoir take precedence over the story of Breytenbach's life; it is more a memoir of place than of persons. He begins by describing the annual wine festival in his native Bonnievale, South Africa, and then moves on to the estate of the daughter of Alex Boraine (co-chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee), and then to the Muscadel festival in Barrydale, where he is greeted by Nelson Mandela. Its his ability to relate the stories of everyone that he encounters along the way that transforms this memoir from a simple travel narrative into a complex web of experiences that add up to a description of a community. A thoughtful and richly allegorical description of postapartheid South Africa. -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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