Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Gordimer appropriates for the title of Living, a compilation of some of her non-fiction essays and speeches, the corniest line in fellow Nobel-laureate's Seamus Heaney's corniest poem: Once in a lifetime/...hope and history rhyme...
...kind of cheap inspiration imparted by this excerpt from the weakest section of The Cure at Troy is perfect for earnest and boring lightweights like Doubletake Magazine which takes the same quote as its mantra but one would really expect more substance from Gordimer, whose fiction breathes with implacable moral force...
...Throughout her career, Gordimer has been a paragon of authorly virtue: a white writer in apartheid South Africa, she stood staunchly with what she always calls the "liberation movement." Her fiction exposes the bleeding heart of South African society, and her eye is precise and unflinching. This is not to say that her fiction is nakedly ideological: rather, it speaks complex truths about human relationships and social realities. It shocks the reader with its honesty...
...Living in Hope and History. In most of her speeches and essays, Gordimer settles for platitudes and truisms rather than incisive commentary. Of course, in two or three of these selections, we do get some flashes of the uncompromising clarity of moral vision that is apparent in her best fiction: but these glimpses of Gordimer at her best only serve in this context to accentuate the reader's disappointment in the rest of the compilation. In 1959: What is Apartheid?, a transcript of a seminar given in Washington DC, we see the Gordimer who we know and admire. Her prose...
...great thing about Gordimer's fiction has always been her success in stripping away the layers of pretense and denial and dishonesty that are built up around contemporary lives and societies. She shows the reader universal truths that are nonetheless elusive: her talent is to unveil revelation. In the nonfiction in this volume, it is Gordimer's practice to reveal truths that are painfully obvious to most anybody. The subtitle of the volume is Notes from Our Century, and Gordimer makes a case study of historical progress out of her native South Africa, taking us from the world of apartheid...