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A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Commonwealt...)
A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa
"Ranks as one of Gordimer's best novels It transcends politics and aims at a meaning higher than human striving."---The Philadelphia Inquirer
When Julie Summers's car breaks down on a street in Cape Town, a young Arab mechanic comes to her aid. Their attraction to each other is immediate. Julia, the daughter of a powerful businessman, is trying to escape a privileged background she despises. Abdu, an educated but poor illegal immigrant, is desperate to evade deportation. The consequences of this chance meeting are unpredictable and intense, as each person's notions of the other are overturned. Set in the social mix of post-apartheid South Africa and an unnamed Arab country, Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup "is a masterpiece of creative empathy...a gripping tale of contemporary anguish and unexpected desire, and it also opens the Arab world to unusually nuanced perception" (Edward W. Said).
(A perfect example of what literature can give us that his...)
A perfect example of what literature can give us that history books cannot Francine Prose The New York Times Book Review A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice Steve and Jabulile once clandestine lovers under a racist law forbidding sexual relations between black and white are living in a newly free South Africa Both were combatants in the struggle against apartheid and now he a university lecturer and she a lawyer are parents of children born in freedom But as the ideals of this better life for all are challenged by the realities of the world around them Steve and Jabulile consider leaving the country they so vehemently fought to free The subject in No Time Like the Present is contemporary but Nadine Gordimer s treatment is as ever timeless In the telling of this conflicted couple she captures the fragmented essence of a nation
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In an extraordinary period immediately before the first...)
In an extraordinary period immediately before the first non-racial election and the beginning of majority rule in South Africa, Vera Stark, the protagonist of Nadine Gordimer's passionate novel, weaves a ruthless interpretation of her own past into her participation into the present as a lawyer representing blacks in the struggle to reclaim the land. None to Accompany Me is arresting and reverbant - perhaps the most powerful novel to date by one of the world's most commanding writers.
(This is the moving story of the unforgettable Rosa Burger...)
This is the moving story of the unforgettable Rosa Burger, a young woman from South Africa cast in the mold of a revolutionary tradition. Rosa tries to uphold her heritage handed on by martyred parents while still carving out a sense of self. Although it is wholly of today, Burger's Daughter can be compared to those 19th century Russian classics that make a certain time and place come alive, and yet stand as universal celebrations of the human spirit. Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born and lives in South Africa.
("Superb...a series of masterly drawn glimpses into the st...)
"Superb...a series of masterly drawn glimpses into the storymaking art of one of Africa's great modern literary geniuses." -Alan Cheuse, NPR
A selection of short stories written to date by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer, Life Times reveals her acute understanding of human nature and paints a fascinatingly original portrait of South Africa. Whether focusing on politics, sexuality, race, love, or loss, Gordimer maps out the terrain of human relationships with razor-sharp psychological insight and a stunning lack of sentimentality. Complex and multifaceted, her stories challenge us, time and again, to examine the conflict between our actions and our unspoken desires. This powerful collection, which includes two new stories, is a testament to Gordimer's literary genius and the ongoing power and relevance of her vision.
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"With the scaffolding of a courtroom drama and the mora...)
"With the scaffolding of a courtroom drama and the moral underpinnings of the state's responsibility, the novel infuses an isolated crime of passion with the atmospheric pressure of a country reeling from its own past." --The Boston Sunday Globe
A house gun, like a house cat: a fact of ordinary daily life. How else can you defend yourself against intruders and thieves in post-apartheid South Africa? The respected executive director of an insurance company, Harald, and his doctor wife, Claudia, are faced with something that could never happen to them: Their son, Duncan, has murdered a man. In this powerful and disturbing anatomy of a murder, Nadine Gordimer examines the effect of violence on the complicated web of love that holds together parents and children, friends and lovers.
Nadine Gordimer was the Nobel Prize winning author of short stories and novels reflecting the disintegration of South African society. While her early works were in the tradition of liberal South African whites opposed to apartheid, her later works reflect a move toward more radical political and literary formulations.
Background
Nadine Gordimer was born on November 20, 1923, in Springs, a mining town on the Eastern Witwatersrand, South Africa. Of Jewish heritage, her mother was from England and her father, from Russia. He worked in the gold mines, first as a mining engineer and later as secretary.
Education
Most of Nadine's life, apart from a brief period in Zambia in the middle 1960s, was spent in South Africa and the Witwatersrand, and it was here that she received her education, first as a day scholar at a convent and later as a student at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Career
From the time her first short story, entitled "Come Again Tomorrow, " was published in the Johannesburg magazine The Forum in November 1939, Gordimer became a prolific author of short stories and nearly a dozen novels. Firmly opposed to notions of racial segregation and apartheid, she wrote in an increasingly polarized and isolated society. This resulted in innovative attempts at developing the South African English novel beyond its conventional tradition of realist literary depiction by exploring the isolated consciousness and experience in what she perceived as a progressively disintegrating society.
In 1953 Gordimer wrote her first novel, The Lying Days, which depicts the adolescent awakening of a white South African girl, Helen Shaw. This was followed in 1958 by the more complex portrait of the Johannesburg world of the middle 1950s seen from the standpoint of a young English newspaperman, Toby Hood, called A World of Strangers. The novel is an important historical portrayal of the short-lived era of multi-racial parties and social contact before the government clampdown on opposition politics after the Sharpeville shooting in 1960 and the resulting banning of Black nationalist movements.
In the early 1960s Gordimer felt increasingly isolated as a white writer in South Africa, and this was especially reflected in The Late Bourgeois World in 1966 in which her central character, Elizabeth Van Den Sandt, sought to forge a new identity for herself after the suicide of her husband, who had been an unsuccessful political activist. The controlled use of time in this novel also indicated a search for an alternative to the conventional novel form as "the bourgeois world" that lay behind this novel tradition appeared to be coming apart.
A short period spent in Zambia with her husband formed the backdrop to her next novel, A Guest of Honour, which was distinctive in being set in a fictitious African country outside South Africa. Her central character, Jeremy Bray, was also a former British colonial official, and the novel embraced a wider set of themes involving the counterpoising of the dead and static society of post-imperial Britain with the vital landscape of Africa in the era after independence.
In The Conservationist (1974), however, Gordimer returned to more conventional South African themes, though the technical virtuosity of its writing led some critics to see this as the finest of her novels. Dealing with the estrangement of an industrialist turned part-time farmer, the novel focuses on the estrangement of South African whites from the African landscape and so takes up a theme that can be traced back to Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm.
By the 1970s Gordimer had moved out of the mainstream liberalism of most South African whites opposed to apartheid and had begun moving toward more radical political and literary formulations. The wide scope of her next novel, Burger's Daughter (1979), set in France and England as well as South Africa, reflected a desire to internationalize many of the political issues in South Africa, which were seen as less ones simply of "race" but also of "class" and class conflict. This central character is a jailed white South African communist whose name evokes the memory of Rosa Luxemburg. The novel was for a period banned in South Africa, as had been the case previously with Occasion for Loving (1965), banned for its depiction of a sexual relationship between white women and black men, and The Late Bourgeois World.
In July's People (1981) Gordimer departed from the question of anchoring the white identity in the South African past and confronted the question of the future as a white couple flee Johannesburg after a rocket attack and hide in the African bush where they become increasingly beholden to their former servant, July. As a penetrating study of the element of power that underpins Black-White relations in South Africa the novel links the private realm of the personal with the wider dimension of political institutions and structures.
A collection of her short stories, Something Out There, was published in 1984, another insightful novel of South Africa's people, A Sport of Nature was published in 1987 and Gordimer's look at post-apartheid South Africa, None to Accompany Me in 1994.
In a 1979–80 interview Gordimer identified herself as an atheist, but added: "I think I have a basically religious temperament, perhaps even a profoundly religious one. "
Politics
Nadine Gordimer was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organization was banned, and gave Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 defence speech at the trial which led to his conviction for life. She was also active in HIV/AIDS causes.
Views
Quotations:
"Music has no limits of a life-span. "
"The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is. "
"Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area. "
"You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder. "
"Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
She was recognized as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity".
Connections
Gordimer had a daughter, Oriane, by her first marriage in 1949 to Gerald Gavron, a local dentist, from whom she was divorced within three years. In 1954, she married Reinhold Cassirer, a highly respected art dealer who established the South African Sotheby's and later ran his own gallery; their "wonderful marriage" lasted until his death from emphysema in 2001. Their son, Hugo, was born in 1955, and is a filmmaker in New York, with whom Gordimer collaborated on at least two documentaries.