Life Times Stories 1952-2007
Nadine Gordimer
Bloomsbury
REVIEW: Hugh Hodge
According to the Meaning of Liff – Douglas Adams’s hilarious “dictionary” for experiences and things unrecorded in proper dictionaries – a “ballycumber” is the pile of books about one’s bed.
To my own ballycumber I recently added Nadine Gordimer’s Life Times – Stories 1952-2007. Actually, there are a few stories written since 2007; all in all there are 38 in the collection.
Together with her essays Telling Times – also published last year by Bloomsbury – and her novels, these form the main body of her writing.
I have to confess I had read some of Gordimer’s stories, but none of her novels and essays. I was the poorer for it, but after reading this collection, I’m already enriched. Soon I will read the rest.
Gordimer is the great writer whose empathy extends across gender, race, time and even species, such as that disgusting tapeworm so immodestly and amusingly hosted in Tape Measure.
Her stories are 3D without the silly glasses. The lens of her interest focuses and holds the eye, pans across a scene, then zooms in with unerring honesty to the nub of the script.
I had a similar reaction to Tolstoy when I read him for the first time years ago: that I had encountered a writer whose understanding of the mind was uncanny.
The writer, the words, the music so engages that I am at once beguiled and consumed with a jealousy that I am bright enough to know I am not bright enough to write so beautifully.
Her descriptions are extraordinarily original and vivid: “…as lacking in interest as the eyes of a tortoise…”; “…a herd boy yelling at a dirty bundle of sheep…”; or poignant as the wonderful evocative paragraphs in The Bridegroom lighting the music of the campfire, “…The first music men ever heard, when they began to stand upright among the rushes at the river, might have been like. When it died away it was difficult to notice at what point it really had gone…”; “…his black eyes hidden in the ancient cave of skull…”; or “…Like a nail he was driven deeper and deeper into isolation…”. There are many such.
Gordimer’s stories map more than 50 years of engagement with life, love and politics. Yet her voice is consistent: it is always Gordimer, as Mozart is always Mozart.
Undercurrents of race and country are pervasive – Gordimer is rooted here, has lived here all her long life. There are many portraits which take caricature to archetype: the smous selling in the dorp and shanty town; the suburbanite, blue collar and white, Afrikaans and English; bergie and golfer; the Jew, the farmer. And always with such wisdom of insight, such empathy for the human condition, such love; no cynicism, no contempt.
Gordimer writes for grown-up readers, as an equal.
She changes point of view effortlessly. She can as easily don the language and thoughts of the petrol pump jockey in Some Monday for Sure as she can that of a foetus in Dear Life.
She has no need to devalue her work by talking down to the reader or employing coyness. Her prose is clear and simple, using the right word in the right place: she is not afraid to use unusual words – I looked up five – nor does she shy from the expletive, if appropriate and necessary.
Interestingly, I feel her language simplifies over time, the early stories showing more willingness to test the reader’s vocabulary than the later.
She writes bravely, especially when there is reason to be afraid. Many stories visit the circumstance and consequence of apartheid. Perhaps the most remarkable of these is the longest story in the book, Something Out There.
And, interestingly, even extending into the new black government in The Rendezvous of Victory.
Are there stand-out stories? For me, yes. I loved Rain Queen, The Bridegroom and Something Out There – they had me lingering over the prose the way I sometimes replay a favourite track for the sheer joy of its perfection, but, by the same token, there were no stories I skimmed.
You will have your own favourites. Perhaps the hilarious, Letter from his Father from Herman to Franz Kafka, the two-part Town and Country Lovers, the sweet naivete of The Diamond Mine, or the immensely sad The Moment Before The Gun Went Off.
This book has now a permanent home on my ballycumber shelf, that place where old favourites live: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the Collected Ted Hughes, John Donne, Selected Mandelshtam – those old friends who accompany my dreams.
In her Nobel Lecture, 1991, Gordimer notes, “For myself, I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.”
l Hodge is a poet, and editor of the literary magazine New Contrast