A Sport of Nature

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 show more 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. show less

In breve
Una donna volitiva, ribelle e coerente lotta per l'affermazione e il progresso del Sudafrica. I sentimenti e la lotta politica si fondono e la giovane insieme al suo compagno occuperà una posizione decisiva nella creazione di un nuovo paese.

Il libro
E' una donna, la forza della natura di cui dice il titolo, una donna particolare: esuberante, curiosa, trasgressiva più per vocazione naturale che per scelta, una donna abituata a vivere d'istinto che si apre lentamente alla consapevolezza. Ma Hillela è anche il filo lungo il quale si snoda una vicenda in cui la tematica cara a Nadine Gordimer già affrontata nei suoi precedenti romanzi torna a riproporsi filtrata da una maestria narrativa che in questo libro raggiunge forse la sua show more punta più alta. In quella fusione di pubblico e privato che è uno degli aspetti caratteristici dell'autrice, la storia di Hillela, il suo distacco dalla famiglia borghese, la partecipazione sempre più attiva alle lotte che sconvolgono il Sudafrica, l'esilio e le sue scelte sentimentali procedono di pari passo con l'evolversi di una vicenda che affonda le sue radici nella storia attuale, ma che la trascende per proiettarsi in una dimensione fantastica dove i conflitti trovano soluzione e gli ideali possono essere realizzati. E così Hillela, donna nuova, vedrà al nascita di un Sudafrica nuovo, uno Stato da lei attivamente voluto e in cui, accanto al marito, si troverà a occupare una delle posizioni chiave. show less

Our heroine, a vapid hippie, mooches aimlessly through political and revolutionary circles in '60's South Africa. Her penchant for sleeping with older black men (daddy issues ahoy!) is seriously presented as passionate anti-apartheid activism. We are told repeatedly how intelligent and irresistible she is, while getting no evidence of either and, in fact, plenty of evidence to the contrary. I couldn't believe this book was written by a woman. I also couldn't believe I finished it.

Gordimer is one of my favorite writers, but I don't think this book is one of her best. I never really understood what motivated the protagonist and I was not convinced that her "revolutionary" ideas were anything more than a desire for personal revenge and undisciplined response to physical attraction to various men in the book. I think Gordimer was trying to demonstrate how Hillela's personal investment in ending apartheid after her husband's murder demonstrates that the sincere political comes from the personal. But the truly self-sacrificing and admirable characters in the book seemed to have a much deeper understanding than H. did. I couldn't like her and was disappointed in Gordimer as she has written some masterpieces on these show more themes. show less

The story of a woman who gained influence and power in Africa during the liberation upheavals. It was suggested that she achieved this by her intelligence and personal integrity but it was more by shifting from one man to another, each more powerful than the last. It was also written with asides to the future and past that often confused the story.

A Sport of Nature by Nadine Gordimer (1988)

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