Dog Heart: A Memoir

If any South African writer's fragmentary meditations are worth reading, those by Breytenbach--the essayist (The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution, etc.), poet, painter and ex-revolutionary who is still a renegade Afrikaner--are in the front rank. Long based in Paris, he has repeatedly returned to his beloved home territory in the rural Cape Province for brief periods, eliciting this mix of reportage and reflection. Those who know South Africa can fill in the political and geographical context; others may find many passages cryptic. For the former group, Breytenbach is an unsparing observer, unwilling to blame the country's endemic violence on historic racism. True, an opening anecdote notes how ""the [white] security dogs"" once harassed a clergyman, but threaded through the book is a gruesome blotter of crimes committed by the black and the brown. The contemporaneous passages--including visits with friends and relatives and some utterly South African encounters, as when an old man on the street asks ""what race am I?"" or when the author meets homeless beach dwellers whose patriotic ""installation"" reminds him of a grave--contrast with Breytenbach's more distanced reflections on family forebears. Throughout, the writing is artful and some passages soar: ""People are trapped in the sad slanting light washing over the country like ants in treacle."" Although not a full-scale view of the New South Africa, this installment in Breytenbach's continuing portrait of self and land offers a multitude of piercing, if idiosyncratic, observations. (Aug.)