Breytenbach, Breyten

New York. 1985. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1st Printing. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0374279357. 396 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Candy Jurnigan. keywords: Literature South Africa . FROM THE PUBLISHER - Breyten Breytenbach is one of South Africa's finest contemporary writers. The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist is a memoir of his seven years - two of which he spent in solitary confinement - in South Africa's prisons. The incarceration of famous South African dissidents like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Denis Goldberg and many more has often provoked an outcry in the West. But no one can imagine exactly what some of these sentences can mean. Now, with the publication of Breytenbach's account, the full horror is presented in a way that will never be forgotten. Here, in pitiless and gripping detail, is the anatomy of life in one of the worst prison systems in the world: the depersonalization, the physical and psychological torture, the condemned lives on Death Row, the hangings, the warders, the routines, and, above all, the thousand and one tiny obsessions of a man left alone with himself for years at a stretch. Breytenbach's testimony in these harrowing pages is more than a document: it is a great work of art. Indeed, the experiences the book describes are so shattering that only art can transform them into bearable recollection. The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist will rank among the classics of writings from prison and as the unmistakable voice of a great writer in extremis. inventory #1587 ISBN: 0374279357.