Yet this is not a prisoner’s book. It would be a crass injustice of underestimation and simplification if it is presented and received that way. It describes how the ordinary time-focus of a man’s perceptions can be extraordinarily rearranged by a definitive experience… Prison irradiates this book with dreadful enlightenments; the dark and hidden places of the country from which the book arises are phosphorescent with it. Breytenbach is a writer who carries his whole life with him, all the time . . . and who possesses a creative ability equal to his experience. His imagery is so exquisite, chilling, aphoristic, witty, that one is reminded how that ancient and most beautiful attribute of writing has fallen into desuetude in prose. —Nadine Gordimer
Mouroir is a complex, demanding, haunting book. It stands as a brief for the act of writing, writing as an exercise of imagination and will . . . the blend between fantasy and reality, the lyric intensity of a narrative consciousness which refuses to be pinned down to one identity or a single mode of existence. —John Edgar Wideman
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