tA Sport of Nature by Nadine Gordimer recounts the life a white Jewish girl named Hillela whose mother abandoned her as a child, who was raised by two aunts, who ran away from a middle-class South African life and became, through sundry love affairs, the widow of a black South African revolutiona...
In Gordimer's slightly-alternate South Africa, tensions between blacks and whites escalates until all-out violence erupts. Shops and buildings are blown up and the whites are fleeing - but even planes are being blown up as they take off, so how is a white family to escape? The Smales family - Bra...
أول تجربة مع الكاتبة الجنوب أفريقية نادين غورديمر والحاصلة على نوبل في عام 1991 لكنني قبل ذلك قرأت حوارا جميلا مع نادين كان مشجعا لكي أبدأ هذا المشوار مع هذا القلم الخصبجولي ذات البشرة البيضاء تنتمي لطبقة برجوازية من أصحاب الإمتيازات في جوهانسبرج لكنها لا تشعر بهذا الإنتماء لذلك تنأى بنفسها عن هذ...
I wonder why it is that the life of poverty is regarded as more real than any other life. In books and films, the slice of life traditionally is cut from the lower crust; in almost all of us with full bellies, whose personal struggles are above the sustenance level, there is a nervous, even a res...
Stopped reading 3/4 of way through. I found this to be too didactic for my liking and the only reason I kept going as far as I did was I felt I would learn something from it, but it wasn't an enjoyable read. If you were studying independence movements in Central Africa I feel it might be a more i...
What a striking opening - the first sentence (“And who was that?”), the first two pages - immediately drawing the reader into the narrative. Writing in questions and sentence fragments, Gordimer succinctly and masterfully presents a plethora of details that outline a situation, a conundrum, that...
This is my first Gordimer, and I thought it was about time, given her recent passing, that I read some of her work. This is a compact novella, set in one day (with plenty of flashbacks) that can easily be read in one sitting.It was first published in 1966 and was banned in South Africa for ten ye...
Do not let the sea of 3-stars fool you into decrying the unpleasantness or the apparent plotlessness of this novel. Not all of us read for pleasure after all. Besides it is an achievement of extraordinary proportions when an author manages to stretch the 'show don't tell' narrative device almost ...
"You're not responsible for your ancestry, are you . . . But if that's so, why have marched under banned slogans, got yourself beaten up by the police, arrested a couple of times; plastered walls with subversive posters . . . The past is valid only in relation to whether the present recognizes it...
Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold – Nadine Gorminder, Get a LifeI thought the idea behind this novel was an intriguing one: after undergoing treatment for thyroid cancer a man—Paul Bannerman—needs to be quarantined from his family for sixteen days because he’s literally r...
Handy compilation of lectures and writing.One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, to speak the unspeakable, to ask difficult questions. - Salman RushdieHow shall we look at each other then? - Mongane Wally SeroteThe ceaseless adventure - Jawaharlal NehruHistory says, Don’t hope...
Coetzee, Naipaul, Lessing and even Maugham wrote in their books about apartheid. They don't focus though only on that (maybe only Naipaul does, but I have only read one book by him), but they also insist on other themes. Gordimer writes about this theme in this book and she does it really well. C...
Some books live unread on our shelves for an inexplicably long time, so that when eventually we pick them up, we wonder what on earth took us so long. That is certainly the case with The Lying Days, both this novel and Nadine Gordimer’s Booker winning The Conservationist have been residing on my ...
And in the morning, it emerged again, a strangely even line of greyish trees, and, afar, was present all day. When we walked up to it, where it bordered the great mealie lands, it separated and thinned into growths of various characters; flat-topped, spreading trees, with mean and sparse foliage,...
We have known that our task was to bring to our people’s consciousness and that of the world the true dimensions of racism and colonialism beyond those that can be reached by the newspaper column and screen image, however valuable these may be. We have sought the fingerprint of flesh on history. ...
She enjoyed the feeling that she had left behind the risk of the Chelsea flat or Hampstead or Kensington house from which so many of her friends looked out, captured, unlikely to get at the world. Marrying Boaz, she had been admitted to the select band who returned only at intervals from teaching...
Sonny and his blonde woman went back to the resort rondavel among the orange blossom. To be away somewhere, once more, to have whole nights together; it was a pause clutched at out of what was pressing them along, breaking in upon them in the timelessness of that one room. Hannah’s idea—Hannah’s ...
Like everyone else, he had great and curious faith in the garden: ‘Well, soon you’ll be up and able to sit out in the garden,’ they said, looking at him fervently, with little understanding tilts of the head. Yes, he would be out . . . in the garden. It was a big garden enclosed in old, dark, sle...
Because I don’t speak. You’re sitting there, and when the train lurches you seem to bend forward to hear. But I don’t speak. If I could find them I could ask for the other half of the money I was going to get when I’d done it, but they’re gone. I don’t know where to look. I don’t think they’re he...
Once it passes from me, it becomes apologia or accusation. I am talking about neither...but you will use my words to make your own meaning. As people pick up letters from the stack between them in word-games. You will say: she said he was this or that: Lionel Burger, Dhladhla, James Nyaluza, Fats...
Now there’s been a postponement. When Harald tells his secretary he will not be in that afternoon everyone in the company knows this must be the day of visiting hours at the prison. If his absence has to be remarked among his peers—apologies from absentees are read out in the routine formalities ...
13, op. 130, and no. 16, op. 135. Does the presenter make the claim as restitution for Beethoven? Presenter’s voice and cadence give him away as irremediably white. Is one-sixteenth an unspoken wish for himself. Once there were blacks wanting to be white. Now there are whites wanting to be black....