Never before has Gordimer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1991, published such a comprehensive collection of her
nonfiction. Telling Tales represents the full span of her works in
that field-from the twilight of white rule in South Africa to the
fight to overthrow the apartheid regime, and most recently, her
role over the past seven years in confronting the contemporary
phenomena of violence and the dangers of HIV. The range of this
book is staggering, and the work in totality celebrates the lively
perseverance of the life-loving individual in the face of political
tumult, then the onslaught of a globalized world. The abiding
passionate spirit that informs "A South African Childhood," a
youthful autobiographical piece published in The New Yorker in
1954, can be found in each of the book's ninety-one pieces that
span a period of fifty-five years. Returning to a lifetime of
nonfiction work has become an extraordinary experience for
Gordimer. She takes from one of her revered great writers, Albert
Camus, the conviction that the writer is a "responsible human
being" attuned not alone to dedication to the creation of fiction
but to the political vortex that inevitably encompasses twentieth-
and twenty-first-century life. Born in 1923, Gordimer, who as a
child was ambitious to become a ballet dancer, was recognized at
fifteen as a writing prodigy. Her sensibility was as much shaped by
wide reading as it was to eye-opening sight, passing on her way to
school the grim labor compounds where black gold miners lived.
These twin decisives-literature and politics-infuse the book, which
includes historic accounts of the political atmosphere, firsthand,
after the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto uprising of
1976, as well as incisive close-up portraits of Nelson Mandela and
Desmond Tutu, among others. Gordimer revisits the eternally
relevant legacies of Tolstoy, Proust, and Flaubert, and engages
vigorously with contemporaries like Susan Sontag, Octavio Paz, and
Edward Said. But some of her most sensuous writing comes in her
travelogues, where the politics of Africa blend seamlessly with its
awe-inspiring nature-including spectacular recollections of
childhood holidays beside South Africa's coast of the Indian Ocean
and a riveting account of her journey the length of the Congo River
in the wake of Conrad. Gordimer's body of work is an extraordinary
vision of the world that harks back to the sensibilities-political,
moral, and social-of Dickens and Tolstoy, but with a decidedly
vivid contemporary consciousness. Telling Times becomes both a
literary exploration and extraordinary document of social and
political history in our times.
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