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#Post#: 389--------------------------------------------------
Author Nadine Gordimer dead at 90
By: agate Date: July 14, 2014, 6:37 pm
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Nadine Gordimer, whose fiction often dealt with South African
apartheid, is dead at the age of 90. Excerpted from the New York
Times (July 14, 2014):
[quote]Nadine Gordimer, Novelist Who Took On Apartheid, Is Dead
at 90
By HELEN T. VERONGOS
Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer whose literary
ambitions led her into the heart of apartheid to create a body
of fiction that brought her a Nobel Prize in 1991, died on
Sunday in Johannesburg. She was 90.
Her family announced her death in a statement.
Ms. Gordimer did not originally choose apartheid as her subject
as a young writer, she said, but she found it impossible to dig
deeply into South African life without striking repression. And
once the Afrikaner nationalists came to power in 1948, the
scaffolds of the apartheid system began to rise around her and
could not be ignored.
�I am not a political person by nature,� Ms. Gordimer said years
later. �I don�t suppose if I had lived elsewhere, my writing
would have reflected politics much, if at all.�
But whether by accident of geography or literary searching, she
found her themes in the injustices and cruelties of her
country�s policies of racial division, and she left no quarter
of South African society unexplored � from the hot, crowded
cinder-block neighborhoods and tiny shebeens of the black
townships to the poolside barbecues, hunting parties and
sundowner cocktails of the white society.
Through Ms. Gordimer�s work, international readers learned the
human effects of the �color bar� and the punishing laws that
systematically sealed off each avenue of contact among races.
Her books are rich with terror. In her stories the fear of the
security forces pounding on the door in the middle of the night
is real. Freedom is impossible; even the liberated political
prisoner is immediately rearrested after experiencing the
briefest illusion of returning to the world.
...
Ms. Gordimer was the author of more than two dozen works of
fiction, including novels and collections of short stories in
addition to personal and political essays and literary
criticism. Her first book of stories, �Face to Face,� appeared
in 1949, and her first novel, �The Lying Days,� in 1953. In
2010, she published �Telling Times: Writing and Living,
1954-2008," a weighty volume of her collected nonfiction.
Three of Ms. Gordimer�s books were banned in her own country at
some point during the apartheid era � 1948 to 1994 � starting
with her second novel, �A World of Strangers,� published in
1958. It concerns a young British man, newly arrived in South
Africa, who discovers two distinct social planes that he cannot
bridge: one in the black townships, to which one group of
friends is relegated; the other in the white world of privilege,
enjoyed by a handful of others he knows.
�A World of Strangers� was banned for 12 years and another
novel, �The Late Bourgeois World� (1966), for 10 � long enough
to be fatal to most books, Ms. Gordimer noted. �The Late
Bourgeois World� deals with a woman who faces a difficult choice
when her ex-husband, a traitor to the anti-apartheid resistance,
commits suicide.
The third banned novel was one of her best-known, �Burger�s
Daughter,� the story of the child of a family of revolutionaries
who seeks her own way after her father becomes a martyr to the
cause. It was unavailable in South Africa for only months rather
than years after it was published in 1979, in part because by
then its author was internationally known.
...
Her ability to slip inside a life completely different from her
own took her beyond the borders of white and black to explore
other cultures under the boot of apartheid. In the 1983 short
story �A Chip of Glass Ruby,� she entered an Indian Muslim
household, and in the novel �My Son�s Story� (1990), she wrote
of a mixed-race character. She won the Booker Prize in 1974 for
�The Conservationist,� which had a white male protagonist.
Long before the struggle against apartheid was won, some of her
books looked ahead to its overthrow and a painful national
rebirth. In"July�s People� (1981), a violent war for equality
has come to the white suburbs, driving out the governing
minority. In a reversal of roles, July, a black servant, brings
his employers, a white family, to his isolated village, where he
can protect them. In �A Sport of Nature� (1987), the white wife
of an assassinated black leader becomes, with a new husband, the
triumphant first lady of a country rising from the rubble of the
old order.
Perhaps surprisingly Ms. Gordimer�s books were not the product
of someone who had grown up in a household where the politics of
race were discussed. Rather, Ms. Gordimer said, in her world,
the minority whites lived among blacks �as people live in a
forest among trees.�
It was not her country�s problems that set her to writing, she
said. �On the contrary,� she wrote in an essay, �it was learning
to write that sent me falling, falling through the surface of
the South African way of life.�
Nadine Gordimer was born to Jewish immigrant parents on Nov. 20,
1923, in Springs, a mining town in a vast, largely rural area in
the northeast now known as Gauteng (formerly part of the
Transvaal). Her father, Isidore Gordimer, a watchmaker who had
been driven by poverty to emigrate from Lithuania, eventually
established his own jewelry store. Her mother, the former Nan
Myers, had moved with her family from Britain and never stopped
thinking of it as home.
...
Scholars and critics have found threads from Ms. Gordimer�s
childhood running through her fiction. John Cooke, in his book
�The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/Public
Landscapes,� saw �the liberation of children from unusually
possessive mothers� as a central theme in Ms. Gordimer�s work.
In novel after novel, he wrote, �daughters learn that truly
leaving �the mother�s house� requires leaving �the house of the
white race.' �
...
In 1949 Ms. Gordimer married a dentist, Gerald Gavron, and they
had a daughter, Oriane. The marriage ended in divorce in 1952.
Two years later she married Reinhold H. Cassirer, an art dealer
who had fled Nazi Germany and was a nephew of the philosopher
Ernst Cassirer. Their son, Hugo, was born in 1955. Reinhold
Cassirer died in 2001; her son and her daughter survive her.
...
She never wrote an autobiography. �Autobiography,� she said in
1963, �can�t be written until one is old, can�t hurt anyone�s
feelings, can�t be sued for libel, or, worse, contradicted.�
She was, however, the subject of a 2005 biography, �No Cold
Kitchen,� which drew wide attention not least for the bitter
fallout she had with its young author, Ronald Suresh Roberts, a
former Wall Street lawyer who had grown up in Trinidad. She had
originally authorized the biography and granted him access, but
she later withdrew the authorization, objecting to the
manuscript and accusing the author of breach of trust. The
publishers under contract for the book � Farrar, Straus & Giroux
in the United States and Bloomsbury in Britain � declined to
publish it. (Both also were publishers of Ms. Gordimer�s work.)
The biography was eventually published by a small South African
house and was the talk of literary South Africa for its
accusation that Ms. Gordimer had admitted to fabricating key
elements in an autobiographical essay in The New Yorker in 1954.
It also paints Ms. Gordimer as a hypocritical white liberal
whose words masked a paternalistic attitude toward black South
Africa.
When the Nobel committee awarded Ms. Gordimer the literature
prize in 1991, it took note of her political activism but
observed, �she does not permit this to encroach on her
writings.�
That sentiment was one she said she clung to throughout her
career. In 1975 she wrote in the introduction to her �Selected
Stories�: �The tension between standing apart and being fully
involved; that is what makes a writer. That is where we begin.�
In later interviews she said that no one could live in a society
like South Africa�s and stay isolated from politics. Looking
back, she told an interviewer in 1994, �The fact that my books
were perceived as being so political was because I lived my life
in this society that was so much changed by conflict, by
political conflict, which of course in practical terms is human
conflict.�
She never stopped grappling with politics, despite her disdain
for the polemical. And book by book, she crept closer to
reconciling her writing with her political self. What she did
not want to do, she said, was to write in the service of the
anti-apartheid movement, despite her deep contempt for the
government system. Over time she revealed that she had been far
from passive when politics touched her personally. She passed
messages; hid friends, including high-ranking figures, who were
trying to elude the police; and secretly drove others to the
border. All these actions appear in her fiction, carried out by
characters much braver than she portrayed herself to be.
The great victory, the end of apartheid, is not the end of the
knotty moral problems those characters confront. In �None to
Accompany Me,� published in 1994, the year Nelson Mandela was
elected president in the country�s first fully democratic vote,
one subplot concerns a black political exile, Didymus Maqoma,
who comes home only to find that he has no place in the current
struggle. Despite his sacrifices, he is overlooked by the
post-revolutionary leaders in favor of his wife.
Reading Ms. Gordimer�s work is a reminder that the noose around
South Africans tightened by increments, with ever stricter laws
followed by correspondingly dimmer expectations. Critics have
said that the tone of Ms. Gordimer�s writing fluctuated with the
political climate, with an air of hope giving way to a sense of
bleakness as racial violence gathered force.
Some of her most difficult moments came in the 1970s, when the
black consciousness movement sought to exclude whites from the
fight for majority rule. That period cut her off from many
intellectuals and artists and left her work vulnerable to
criticism from many black Africans, who contended that a white
author could never authentically tell a story through the eyes
of a black character.
Ms. Gordimer fought off that accusation, saying, �There are
things that blacks know about whites that we don�t know about
ourselves, that we conceal and don�t reveal in our relationships
� and the other way about.�
In the end the government was too weak to enforce its laws while
contending with armed opposition within and economic and
political pressure from outside. In 1990, Mr. Mandela was
released from prison; in 1991 apartheid laws were repealed, in
1993 a new Constitution was approved, and in 1994, the walls
came tumbling down with the election.
During that exhilarating period, when Mr. Mandela�s African
National Congress party regained legal standing, Ms. Gordimer,
who had been a secret member, paid her dues in person and got a
party card.
It was then, after the release of the man who would be president
within a few years, that Ms. Gordimer won the Nobel Prize.
�Mandela still doesn�t have a vote,� she said at the time.
Ms. Gordimer went on writing after apartheid, resisting the idea
that its demise had deprived her of her great literary subject.
It �makes a big difference in my life as a human being,� she
said, �but it doesn�t really affect me in terms of my work,
because it wasn�t apartheid that made me a writer, and it isn�t
the end of apartheid that�s going to stop me.�
...
She ventured into an Arab country in her 2001 novel, �The
Pickup,� and continued to write prolifically for years after
apartheid became history. Politically, she eventually embraced
other causes, among them the fight against the spread of the
H.I.V. virus and AIDS in South Africa and a writers� campaign
against the country�s punishing secrecy law.
In the end, one of her greatest fears proved hollow. Although
Ms. Gordimer was immensely gratified to receive the Nobel, its
valedictory connotations led her to worry about what it said to
the world about her future.
�When I won the Nobel Prize,� she said, �I didn�t want it to be
seen as a wreath on my grave.�[/quote]
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