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 to be read shelves for several years. I am very glad though that I started with this one, because it was, as I soon discovered, Gordimer’s first novel. As a first novel it is extraordinary – there is a slow, dreamlike quality to much of the narrative, sections where little happens, and in that perhaps we see the inexperience of a first time novelist. There is however, still so much to admire in this, South African novel of a young woman’s political and emotional emergence into a complex, divided society. “Statutes and laws and pronouncements may pass over the heads of the people whom they concern, but shame does not need the medium of literacy. Humiliation goes dumbly home – a dog, a child too small to speak can sense it – and it sank right down through all the arid layers of African life in the city and entered the blood even of those who could not understand why they felt and acted as they did, or even knew that they felt or acted.”Our narrator is Helen Shaw who grows up in the white community that surrounds the Atherton gold mine where her father is secretary. Here within a fairly privileged, sheltered white world – Helen is an only child, cossetted by a mother’s who has never sought to question anything around her. The family have a large, comfortable house, a black servant, Anna looks after the domestic tasks, but she lives outside the house in a small dwelling behind the main house. The family and the other white people associated with the mine, socialise only with one another. Meanwhile the black mine workers have little impact upon the lives of these white people whose very world is designed to come into contact with them as little as possible. For the first seventeen years of her life, this is the only world that Helen knows. Then, Helen is allowed to go and spend the summer with Mrs Koch a family friend on the coast. Here Helen meets Ludi, a soldier on leave, Mrs Koch’s son, is a lot older than Helen, sensual and a little unconventional, he begins to show Helen that there is another world than the one she grew up in.Full review https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2015/...
What do You think about The Lying Days (2015)?
Exquisite writing by the great Ms Gordimer; I could not put this down, even though some have said in reviews that it is slow-moving and boring. As a South African, I find this story fascinating as it is set during the time when my parents were children (having emigrated from England as toddlers with their parents) and the country was on a tragic path in our history. Descriptions of the city of Johannesburg and Durban, especially the port area, are amazing:"The old airport on the Snell parade was still in use then, and the taxi that took me to my hotel passed smoothly between the green of the airport with its fringe of umbrella trees on one side and the sea deep green behind a low bank of bush on the other...the plan of Durban is very simple and sensible: the visitors live in a long strip of hotels, spread for more than a mile along the beachfront; the town lies immediately behind that, on either side of West Street which lifts up from the sea; the residents live behind that, up in the hills..."I expected more overt racial violence in the book but instead the story portrays the hidden nature of the suffering so effectively through a coming-of-age romantic human drama, as well as the slow awakening of the young Helen to the injustices around her, being born into the privileged white society of the local mine. The simplicity of this awakening of a young adult is almost more shocking in its understated nature, than if the message were reported by a more mature narrator:"We were all like sleepers, coming awake from a long lull of acceptance. I know that I, who for all my childhood had lived surrounded by natives who simply attended our lives in one function of another...found with real consciousness of strangeness and wonderment that I was beginning to think of them as individually human."Well worth the read, and recommended for a possible English set work in high school Grade 11...
—Keryn
