Adapting to a New Vastness

...the challenges they pose are not...

...In “Safety Procedures,” a man admits “there has always been something to be afraid of...

...A Beneficiary” has the daughter of an actress discovering that the father with whom she grew up was most likely not her blood father, and everything she knows is challenged except her tenderness toward him...

...Undiminished in spite of all the changes it has registered, Nadine Gordimer’s is a voice I never tire of hearing...

...the revulsion at that presence, there in us all...

...Or, on a more intimate note, “Everyone fears death but no one admits to the fear of grief...

...Although her 11th collection of stories, Beethoven Wa s One-Sixteenth Black, has a provocative title, its subjects are not exactly headline grabbers...

...the story goes on to mock the ironies of racial interchangeability: “Once there were blacks wanting to be white...

...The last three stories, a series joined by the title “Alternative Endings,” are preceded by a brief essay explaining that “a writer . . . picks up an imagined life at some stage in the human cycle and leaves it at another”—which may be the most elegantly concise description I’ve seen of what fiction hopes to do...

...It’s a lovely fantasy...

...the betrayals, embodied in the physical, are all the more painful for the way they are felt and then suppressed and borne...

...Gordimer goes on to talk about what is left in and left out before finally asking whether a story that ends “This Way” might not just as easily have ended “That Way...

...In the changed political landscape she has adjusted and accommodated without skipping a beat...

...The essential skill of this Nobel Prize-winner has always been making politics personal: domesticating the painful social separations of her tormented country...

...The unlikely assertion about the composer is the opening line of the book...

...The . . . emergent black jet-set looked to take possession of fake Bauhaus and California haciendas that had been the taste of the final generation of whites in power, the deposed many of whom had taken their money and gone to Australia or Canada where the Aborigines and the Red Indians had been effectively dealt with...

...The lived experience on every page of this collection reminds us, indirectly, of how young and callow so many of our wunderkind superstars remain...

...I can’t claim that this book has drastically changed me—its stories are not the most consequential of Gordimer’s remarkably long and prolific career...

...In “Allesverloren” (a word derived from the Dutch that, maybe too explicitly, means “everything lost”), a widow probes the past of her beloved husband who years ago had spoken dismissively of a homosexual affair during his unhappy first marriage...

...But its wit, its inventiveness and descriptive power, its almost casual comprehension of the complexities of time and place, and its kindness to all but its most benighted characters make it a very rewarding work...

...But she finds that the preoccupations of the world— tsunamis, Darfur, Iraq, “a rape charge in court indicting a member of government in my country,” and so on through all the dire scenes of the nightly news— are now “all one to them...

...It’s the same secret...

...The standard changes with each regime...

...Here Gordimer puts aside the cynicism of the “Beethoven” opener to observe that her guests are tightly interconnected: “Edward is a Palestinian, he’s also in his ethics of human being, a Jew, we know that from his writings, his exposure of the orientalism within us, the invention of the Other that’s survived the end of the old-style colonialism into globalization...

...Gangsters, extremist political groups Right and Left tossing bombs into restaurants, hijacks, holdups, a city plumb on the line of an earthquake fault...

...Poor thing, he cries from the depths that he “has never before known the outside, only the insides of existence” (of which he has given a very graphic description...

...An academic who knows his black students in “the new millennium times” do not see him as “particularly reprehensible,” nonetheless discovers to his chagrin that neither do they “value much the support of whites, like himself...

...The notion, of course, was foolish...

...The same antic spirit prevails in “History,” where she brings us an ancient and opinionated parrot named Auguste who has witnessed “many phases, stages, stations of lifetime . . . those that people remember, have forgotten, or want to forget...

...The roach would undoubtedly agree...

...Both are set adrift to face the demands of a soul-shattering adjustment whose details are rendered with the same precision Gordimer brought to the angst of those ill at ease in a divided South Africa...

...To illustrate, she proceeds to spin out three variations on the theme of a discovered infidelity, each intuited through a beautifully, even daringly, documented sense: sight, hearing, smell...

...In these stories only the situations are absurd...

...Except for its shift to a social scene newly tolerant of such traffic across racial lines, the title story is vintage Gordimer...

...That’s the reasoning...

...The story’s tone is amused, and free of illusions about the need to know what is probably unknowable and, even if provable, merely useful up to a point because, in the end, “the past is valid only in relation to whether the present recognizes it...

...And like so many of Gordimer’s less playfully displaced characters, he can finally claim, “But I’m adapting to this vastness...

...You can’t be on somebody else’s side...

...The Things this woman knows and casually tosses off...

...Author, “Half a Heart” IN SPITE OF the relief I shared with most of the civilized world when the formal policies of apartheid ended, I remember worrying that Nadine Gordimer’s stock in trade seemed—like that of the authors of Cold War spy novels—to have evaporated...

...But elsewhere the shocks and dangers are those that eat the trust out of private lives...

...The majority have at their center a secret swallowed and kept down with an aching discretion...

...he asks, irritated, and alights in search of his family’s history, hoping to unearth its hidden racial identity, to find the possible undamning “one drop,” as we say here...

...In two of the stories the seismic shift is internal, for a variety of reasons never displayed...

...THE MOST UNLIKELY serious (and unapologetically didactic) tale, “Dreaming of the Dead,” takes us to a Chinese restaurant where Edward Said, Susan Sontag and the British journalist and biographer of Nelson Mandela, Anthony Sampson, return from their graves for an exceedingly companionable dinner...

...As someone “mistaken in my logic of one still living,” Gordimer has begun by expecting argument...

...She is able to play her music in many keys, however...

...In the latter work, a middle-class white woman marries a man from an unnamed Middle Eastern country whose alien status forces him to take her home with him...

...After 50 years of composing earnest and pained chronicles, Gordimer is having a good time...

...In “Gregor,” a writer is bemused at finding, while immersed in rereading Kafka’s Diaries, a creature suspiciously like a cockroach trapped inside her typewriter...

...He too must weather a terrible adjustment as his host succeeds in expelling him...

...So it is not such a stretch for her to have journeyed from, say, the mutiny during the (imagined, anticipated) revolution of a white family’s trusted servant in July’ s P eople to a quite literal exile in her first post-apartheid novel, The Pickup...

...If Susan’s a Jew, she too, has identity beyond that label, hers has been one with Vietnamese, Sarajevans, many others, to make up the sum of self...

...A profound, not to say ingenious, writer will find material everywhere, and she has continued to produce original, challenging fiction...

...Even her love stories have tasted history’s gifts and deformations...

...The old issues Gordimer knew so intimately as both an activist and a storyteller—race, status, social inclusion and exclusion based on color and class— may now tend to hover at the edges, but it is still a privilege to confront in all their variations the concerns of a mind that is so sophisticated, candid and humane...

...The remaining stories are rather forlorn yet graceful...

...Now there are whites wanting to be black...

...Reviewed by Rosellen Brown Professor of English, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago...

...She wonders if she has caused him to materialize...

...The story about the writer who discovers the cockroach in her typewriter begins by insisting that “Anyone who is a reader knows that what you have read has influenced your life...

...Perhaps “Dreaming of the Dead” is a friendly, unironic simplification and though she denies it, a bit of a romanticization, but then, who among us the living can truly know...

...She does not need to write about race to conjure the profound loneliness of her alienated characters...

...What a surprise, then, to move on to the next one, “Tape Measure,” and discover that we are hearing the voice of a tapeworm with attitude...