All One Horse

by Breyten Breytenbach

Book Overview

'All One Horse is . . . a cartography of exile, a primordial mythology, a surreal philosophy of history and an exegesis of the art of poetry . . . There is weight to every passage, political weight, human weight, natural weight . . .It's as if G rard de Nerval had made it, immortally, into the 21st century, gone deep into apartheid-era South Africa and refused to go mad.' - Elizabeth Bachner, Bookslut

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0979333075
• ISBN13: 9780979333071
• Release Date: August 2008
• Publisher: Archipelago Books
• Length: 115 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Figurative and innovative

In this brief but brilliant book, the South African writer Breyten Breytenbach (who wrote poems in Afrikaans in the 1960s and then moved on to painting and to writing most of his stories and novels directly in English) presents the reader with short narratives and watercolours. There is an equal number of texts and images.The texts can be either read as short stories or as prose poems. The title of each text is the last line or the last phrase of the text. Readers familiar with Breytenbach's metaphorical and (to some extent) allegorical universe won't be surprised with the stories, though the phrasings and the arty rhythmical intricacies are at their most consummate and their most enigmatic here.It is difficult to take the watercolours separately from the texts, because they are obviously meant to be "read" together with the stories. There are echoes between most of the situations that can be found in the narratives and the recurrent motifs that give depth to the watercolours.Breytenbach is a deliberately and extremely figurative artist. His practice is very different from the general tendency to more and more abstraction.And yet, the paintings are also fully post-modern. Literally speaking, the watercolours are amazing; we are lost in some kind of labyrinth, where enigmas seem to be impossible to solve. The same motifs keep coming back (pens, brushes, horse-shaped animals) but, instead of providing clear-cut links with either the stories or the similar motifs in other paintings, the recurrent motifs are confusing. In fact, Breytenbach demonstrates superbly the power of illusion: small details can be apprehended separately but can never really make a whole. The search for unity or homogeneity is but a mere illusion: variety and versatility ensure creative as well as political freedom.Everything is the same ("all one horse"), except when it isn't.