Intimate Stranger

by Breyten Breytenbach

Addressed to a young writer, Intimate Stranger is an eclectic and generous work flowing with insight and wit. Breytenbach's candid and provocative reflections on reading and writing guide without guiding, open mental channels, surprise, and inspire. A stirring glimpse into the mind of an artist, Intimate Stranger is a river of experience and visions, brimming with sleights of tongue and overshifting in mood. This genre-defying gem makes manifest Einstein's "Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach.

Genres: Poetry, Africa, African Literature, Fiction, South Africa

248 pages, Paperback

First published August 28, 2009

About the author

Breyten Breytenbach was a South African writer, poet, and painter. He became internationally well-known as a dissident poet and vocal critic of South Africa under apartheid, and as a political prisoner of the National Party-led South African Government. He is also known as a founding member of the Sestigers, a dissident literary movement, and was one of the most important living poets in Afrikaans literature.

Reviews

[ambyr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Years ago, I went to a glorious exhibit of hand-bound art books at the Mexican Cultural Institute, one of my favorite obscure DC museums, and came across a book of poetry by Breyten Breytenbach whose single opened page rattled through my mind for days:

From the beginning there was the need to go father and take along what I have to offer--salts, spices, stories, muskets, maybe slaves--to barter for what I must obtain in order to continue. One travels so deeply from language to language (that is, from riverbed to riverbed) that one is no longer a stranger in the place of destination.

The problem with art books exhibits, of course, is that if it's the story you're after, and not the art and craft of binding, you're out of luck; you only ever get to read the single page. But I dutifully noted down the exhibit caption and went off to Amazon, and in due time a serviceably (if not nearly as artistically) bound copy of Intimate Stranger arrived at my door.

Having read it, I can now confirm that the quote in question is not from Intimate Stranger and that the exhibit was sadly mislabeled; the poem quoted above is from the (much more difficult to obtain) A Veil of Footsteps, which I will not be ordering from Amazon on account of how the price there is currently in the four figures. But perhaps a library copy will be in my future.

As to the book actually at hand . . . that's a slippery thing. It's writing advice, but it's not writing advice; "Don't bother with theory and criticism. Never read the kind of shit you have at present under the eyes," Breytenbach says, and, earlier, "Help us keep banality down by regularly, quietly and undramatically eliminating a creative-writing-course-produced or academy-embedded poet." It's philosophy about Truth and Art and Beauty and Evil, and while overarching concepts remain in my mind the words themselves flowed past like water; I found I could read a page, put the book down, and read the page again with no memory of having seen the words before, over and over again.

Maybe that's poetry; Breytenbach talks again and again about the need to separate word from meaning, to master rhythm and pattern and flow. But it surprised me when my previous experience with Breytenbach had been so sharp, each word clear and necessary.

Maybe I just need to read it again (and again, and again) until the words take hold at last, until I am, as Breytenbach says, "moving over the pattern of the known." I should, I guess, have plenty of time to do so before I finally get my hands on a copy of A Veil of Footsteps.

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’d suggest that poetry is a world (the world inside and outside us) shaped by breath. It is the breath of dreaming drawn from a hunger for awareness — the awareness that tells you that to be awake is also the result of dreaming expressed in the internal vibration of rhythm. Poetry is a love. Of what? Of the discovery and the celebration of words, things, feelings, ideas, undigested memories, insights, other people, yourself, other selves, mystery, sense, eternity, other eternities, nonsense, nothingness, the whales and the foam and the shadow of grass on the mountain, the bones of the dog buried in the garden. Of love itself. And it is an engagement with all of the above. It is a love-act. […] The paradox is that you imagine you are emptying the self on the page, and what you get is a mirror in which the triteness or relative (un)importance of your emotions is weighed. One finds that an endless fascination with self and the caressing of one’s own loneliness will not take you very far down the road of becoming other. Staking out the self is a lonely business; you end up finding your shadow a noisy stalker scaring the self into a fearful blathering.
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Writing is the dialectic between absence and presence. It is the art of leaving out so that you can let in more.
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Writing is the intelligent but unbiased heart living in its own beating. The only way to gain detachment, also from that heart, is to remain intimately involved with its ebb and its flow.

[Mridula Koshy]

heady stuff. am reading it slowly. a little bit. then a long pause. then a little bit more. poetic and exhausting. illuminating.

[Curtis Bauer · Rating 5 out of 5]

open it anywhere, and it will tell you something you need to know. Seems to change like Borges'"The Book of Sand," grow, become a fixation...hence a book to carry in your pocket.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best of Breytenbach's nonfiction – but not a "best of" collection, mind – this is a handsome little volume by Archipelago press. It ranges widely in pursuit of a central topic: the writer's voice speaking to his listener who herself will become a writer. A good place to pick up Breytenbach's recent thought, and much more of the moment than his older political writings.

[Kasandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like a lot of the author's advice on writing, even though it's delivered in a confusing, maddening stream-of-consciousness style. There are gems throughout. I don't like his actual poetry, though, or at least what he chose to include in this small book, so that detracted from my enjoyment of the whole. If you can get past the style in which this is written, it's got a lot to say on the craft.

[Nicki Hennessey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good quick read.