Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014)

This was a challenging book for me to read because of the style and verbal exchanges. There was no indication as to whom was speaking. The shift of power after the Smales are taken by July to his village is evident and profound, especially in that this book was written before Apartheid was finished. I did find that the introspection by the white couple was boring and completely off the mark - they were proud of their liberalism but had difficulty in seeing how their responses to their situation perpetuated animosity between the races.… (more)

A strange novel. Gordimer traces Hillela, a free-spirited, Jewish, white South African from having sex with her cousin to becoming the widow of a black South African revolutionary and eventually the wife of an African freedom-fighter-turned-president of an unnamed country. Gordimer uses the third-person voice, but she writes about Hillela from a distance, almost through the eyes of other characters. Hillela does not seem especially ideological, at least in the beginning--she almost seems to fall into the life of being an African revolutionary. Or rather, she almost seems like an auxillary to African revolutionaries--she is almost always defined by who she sleeps with. Gordimer seems to be saying something here about sex and politics but I am not sure what. I think Gordimer is at her best when she writes about the delusions of Olga and Paulina, Hillela's aunts, the former being vapidly apolitical and the latter being liberal but not really grasping the enormity of apartheid and what it would take to kill it.… (more)