End Papers: Essays, Letters, Articles of Faith, Workbook Notes

by Breyten Breytenbach

The book collects the author's political writings from both in and out of prison. Included in the volume are polemical essays about the present political situation in South Africa and prescient statements about the future.

270 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1986

About the author

Breyten Breytenbach was a South African writer, poet, and painter. He became internationally well-known as a dissident poet and vocal critic of South Africa under apartheid, and as a political prisoner of the National Party-led South African Government. He is also known as a founding member of the Sestigers, a dissident literary movement, and was one of the most important living poets in Afrikaans literature.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

selection of assorted breytenbach short texts, essays, letters and so on from the late 60s to the mid 80s. most interesting to me were the assessments of apartheid south africa's prospects of survival and the very short but rewarding piece about meeting borges.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of Breytenbach's essays from before his journey through prison, headed by the title "Blind Bird," and from after his prison stint, headed by "Burnt Bird," these are great snapshots in essay form of Breytenbach's fiery career: a restless critic, a stridently antiapartheid voice, a poetic innovator, a thoughtful & passionate writer. Across the span of the collection they also help illustrate his self-acknowledged transformation from sightless to scorched or, in other words, from an idealist and humanist writer earnestly taking on the troubles of his world to a more embittered, wary voice paradoxically more open to humanism, if a humanism of a different kind.

Life is not entirely correct or tender in its treatment of the human. Put another way: characteristic of the human condition is that you are a broken rhythm, that time catches up with you, that you quite simply develop too tardily to be able to digest effectively the dollops of 'liberated' wisdom you may have managed to imbibe through a tight gullet. / Everywhere around you, like tiny unscripted fables, you become aware of the paradoxes and the ironies of the matter...

Not yet at the sophistication and organic development of prose found in the later Intimate Stranger, this is nevertheless a good vision of the poet's developing prose style and poetics.