South African poet Breytenbach (True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist
) offers a dreamy take on the artistic impulse in these 27 short prose fictions. Many are slyly couched as fables; each has a facing page watercolor in Breytenbach’s own hand. The poet’s role—as the book’s consistent speaker notes in “This Unmemorable Memory Exists!”—is like that of a tree: to create a space, to consecrate absence, to be “a place where oblivion could be predicated and practiced endlessly.” In “Between the Legs,” the narrator finds “God is Word or Flesh or some such”; repeatedly uses the Holocaust codeword Sonderbehandlüng
(it’s not translated, but it means “special handling”); and ends by noting “God 'is a Brazilian’.” Near book’s end, in “Bathed in Tears,” the speaker confronts an imposter brother—who may be a symbol of artistic fraudulence—with a knife and tries to skin his hands. Surreal and opaque, Breytenbach’s self-described “minor” squibs on where art comes from (written in the mid-1980s and seeing their first U.S. publication) are equal parts violence and whimsy. (Sept.)
