The Urbanized Black Book

One of the most deep, impressive works of speculative (non)fiction coming out of the prison experience -- South Africa in this case. Breytenbach is a writer gifted with precise observation, explosive prose and deep emotional expanse. He is among my all time favorite writers, and a beautiful painter as well. If you like David Mitchell but want something more personal and at once more political, Breytenbach has the skillz. It's a wonder that he is relatively unknown still, but I would put him in Nobel Prize territory. Like Mitchell, his prose is poetic; both know how to switch from infinite magical realism to haiku at a moment's notice. True Confessions is an inspiring book, but also a daunting one, as we are choosing to look at things that are quite simply hard to look at -- that is, the fate of the political prisoner. While Kafka's characters' brushes with the Law are highly metaphorical and bureaucratic, here we have a narrator of his powers doing it for real, dealing directly with the isolation, the wavering of hope, the loss, the repetition of innumerable days. Of a nine year sentence, Breytenbach ended up spending 7 years incarcerated, just for fighting earlier in his life against Apartheid and making the mistake of visiting his homeland again after his exile years in Paris. Also, if you like this, I would also recommend the book Mouroir, which serves in a sense as a dreamtime companion to this book, delving deeper into the freedom of the imagination, which no one can take away.