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"Nothing I write in such factual pieces will be as true as my fiction," Nadine Gordimer asserts in the opening essay of
Living in Hope and History. It's hard to think of any line that would inspire less confidence in a book of nonfiction. But the author, after all, is a Nobel laureate, an antiapartheid activist, an African National Congress member, and a public figure of unimpeachable moral seriousness--and her warning is no piece of postmodern playfulness. Instead she means to draw an important distinction between genres. Nonfiction, in Gordimer's view, issues from her own political agenda, while her transcendent aim in fiction is to represent
the way things are. The two impulses may overlap, of course, but they are seldom congruent. She's quick to acknowledge that writers can't truly escape politics, nor would it be desirable if they could. Still, writes Gordimer, "the transformation of the imagination must never 'belong' to any establishment, however just, fought-for, and longed-for."
What this collection offers, then, is not art itself but the record of one woman's fierce dedication to both her art and her politics--and her attempts to negotiate the relationship between them. Living in Hope and History includes graduation addresses, lectures, the author's Nobel acceptance speech, impressively learned essays on Joseph Roth and Günter Grass, and even her correspondence with Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe. Dating from the dark old days of apartheid through the present, the assemblage also offers a moving document of the South African struggle and its eventual fruits. Some of the most exhilarating pieces chronicle the new, postapartheid nation--"The First Time" finds Gordimer standing in voting queues for her country's first democratic elections, and "Act Two: One Year Later" is a celebration of Johannesburg's newfound vibrancy. Living in Hope and History is first and foremost a record of Gordimer's life as a public figure. In these essays, however, the political and the imaginative seem to sound a common, joyful note: this is the way things are, this is the way things should be. --Mary Park
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From Publishers Weekly
Nobel literature laureate Gordimer (The House Gun, etc.) has collected decades' worth of erudite essays and lectures about literature, culture, human rights and, of course, her work and home ground of South Africa. The first essay, a 1988 effort on fiction, morals and politics, lays out the distinction between political partisanship in her nonfiction and "the free transformation of reality" in what she refers to as her more "true" fiction. As essays, these writings shouldn't be expected to attain the nuance and depth of Gordimer's best fiction, but some of them are devastating, such as a 1966 piece on how South African black writers were being banned while whites were offered lectures called "Know the African." The more recent pieces deftly capture what she calls "the epic of our transformation": South Africa's first democratic election, she writes, "has the meaning of people coming into their own." Still, it troubles her that writers she admiresAHungary's Joseph Roth, Milan Kundera, Czeslaw MiloszAhave rejected the leftist politics to which she remains committed. Unfortunately, this book lacks Gordimer's up-to-date reckoning with the fate of South Africa's Left, not to mention the more autobiographical reflections readers might desire. Still, this literary world citizen ranges widely (there are essays on Senghor, Grass and Mahfouz), musing thoughtfully about the sociocultural "givens" that a writer and reader must share. In her 1991 Nobel Prize lecture, Gordimer asserted that "the writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties." Though it is a tough credo to live up to, these essays are the work of a tough-minded, morally rigorous writer who has managed to do it.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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