"Writing is a messy way of committing suicide," the exiled South African poet and painter Breyten Breytenbach observes in "The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution," his bumpy and scattershot new collection of essays about art, politics and civilization in decline. For Breytenbach, that's not just a throw-away line. He's got a wildly destructive streak, both on and off the page, that's made him one of the most fascinating (and perplexing) literary figures of the century.

His story's worth relating. Breytenbach's early collections of poetry, which raged against apartheid, were written in his native Boer language and won him a reputation as "an Afrikaner Dante." His vigorous and often whimsical political essays, dispatched from Paris -- where he was exiled after marrying a Vietnamese woman, defying South Africa's ban on interracial marriage -- landed like incendiary bombs. Breytenbach was later arrested in South Africa while on a botched political mission for an anti-apartheid group, and he served nearly eight years in prison, a period sketched in a harrowing memoir titled "The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist." Far worse for Breytenbach, however, were his attempts while in prison to cooperate with the South African police. Debate rages still about his actions: Were they prompted by insanity brought on by brutal conditions? Or were they, as Breytenbach claims, misguided but harmless attempts to deceive his captors?

Either way, this period clearly haunts him. In "The Memory of Birds" he writes that people continue to ask him: "Tell us about your exile! Give us, again and again, the juice extracted from your years in prison! . . . Make us feel sorry for you." Breytenbach succeeds here in steering clear of his years in prison; he writes instead about contemporary politics, and there are some strong pieces. Two of the best are rambling "open letters" to Nelson Mandela written during the early days of his presidency. While proclaiming his own "critical loyalty," Breytenbach praises Mandela but warns about potential violence, and he nitpicks the new president's choices of cabinet members. In another section he writes of white South Africans, movingly, that "defeat will save us." And his critiques of pop culture are occasionally both funny and tart; for example, he zings the way we sit in front of television screens "idly fingerfucking" the remote.

More often, however, the pieces here are pointless and rambling; he's idly fingerfucking with his (and our) wits. When he blasts easy targets like fast food, Swiss Banks, and "Mickey Mouse culture" (often in the same sentence, and at great length), Breytenbach sounds like a sour geezer in the grandstands, a strange combination of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andy Rooney. Metaphors are mixed to the point of delirium: "The unexposed moons of our minds were screwed by Freud and Co. fishing for amputated joy," he writes, "and now we distrust the very correctness of our most intimate emotions." By the time you reach the unreadable essay labled (groan) "Fragments from a Growing Awareness of Unfinished Truths," you're left wondering if he shouldn't have simply titled it, "Go Away."

-- Dwight Garner