SOUTH AFRICAN WRITER GIVEN NOBEL
NADINE GORDIMER CHRONICLED SORROWS OF HER NATIVE LAND

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: Friday, October 4, 1991
Page: 1
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

Gordimer, 67, is the author of 10 novels and more than 200 short stories; her work over the past 40 years has insistently (and increasingly) focused upon the legacies and moral consequences of apartheid. Heralded as well as banned in her native country, Gordimer has consistently refused to leave South Africa: By addressing its political and racial turmoil in her fiction, she has chosen a spiritual exile over an actual one. In announcing its selection to the press yesterday morning, the Academy praised Gordimer for her ''magnificent epic writing . . . her compassion and her outstanding literary style."

She is perhaps best known for her novels "The Late Bourgeois World" (1966), "The Conservationist" (1974), "Burger's Daughter" (1979) and ''July's People" (1981); her most recent collection of stories, "Jump," has just been released by her US publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Born in 1923 in the small mining town of Springs, Gordimer grew up in a white middle- class milieu -- her father was a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, her mother, English-born -- and, because of childhood illness, had an autodidact's education. Her first story was published when she was 15; her first collection, "Face to Face," a decade later.

When asked over the years about influences upon her work, Gordimer has insisted that she was always "a natural writer," but she has nonetheless invoked Chekhov and Eudora Welty again and again. It is true that her stories have the careful, tensile strength reminiscent of both those writers; in fact, Gordimer's own force and acuity are often most apparent within the constraints of this shorter, demanding form.

"I would like to say something about how I feel in general about what a novel, or any story, ought to be," Gordimer said in the prestigious Paris Review interview in 1980. "It's a quotation from Kafka. He said, 'A book ought to be an ax to break up the frozen sea within us.' "

Eschewing the myth of the artist as isolate, one who creates from some remote plain on society's landscape, Gordimer writes with the clear gaze of an artist under siege. But she is not so much a solely political writer as she is a profoundly honest one, writing from beneath the burden of history. She has embraced the agonies of apartheid -- its cruel consequences on both sides of the color line -- as naturally as another writer, at another time, might have written of Victorian England or the American South.

Published in 1966, "The Late Bourgeois World" was the first of Gordimer's novels to draw international attention; it was also banned in her own country. Invoking the spiritual dread of insular white existence, the novel was more resounding in its recriminations of South Africa than her previous work, and set a tone for much of the fiction that followed. "Burger's Daughter," banned for a short period in South Africa and published here in 1979, elaborated upon the theme of political commitment in its story of an Afrikaner activist's daughter; with its lack of quotation marks, its cross-cutting in time and point of view, the novel's departure was stylistic rather than thematic.

While Gordimer has been recognized for decades as a searingly political writer, her most moving work -- some might even say her most political -- has been within the realm of the excruciatingly personal. Nowhere is this more true than in her 1981 novel, "July's People," in which a family of white liberals -- fleeing the tumult of revolution -- take refuge with July, their black servant of 15 years, and his family. It is a sparse, haunting novel, and its details -- from separated lovers to the aroma of morning tea -- leave a signature of enigmatic sadness.

For all of Gordimer's unwavering attention to the world around her, one of her most distinct attributes as a writer is her elliptical, even cryptic style. This trait can come across as wooden in the more overtly political of Gordimer's fiction, such as the 1987 novel, "A Sport of Nature"; it is almost as though her heart thrives most within the microcosm of particularity. This private world of sorrow is beautifully evoked in the 1990 novel "My Son's Story," in which a love affair between a man of mixed race and a white woman is painstakingly relayed by the man and his heartbroken son. By focusing upon the conflicting loyalties of one family, Gordimer throws the larger injuries of South Africa's injustices into sharp relief: While the boy describes with ironic hindsight "the charmed circle in which we lived in innocence," his father -- in the midst of a dreamlike moment -- remembers, against his will, "the filth of scrap-heap settlements and the smashed symmetry of shot bodies."

These hidden wounds of apartheid -- its unseen scars and silent scourge -- are the real background, and consequent force, of Nadine Gordimer's fiction. In the recently published story collection "Jump," her tragic realization of past and present feels both more poignant and more urgent than ever -- whether in the presence of a lonely white man living in dishonor, or in that of a young black girl finding her way home.

In 1986, speaking before the International PEN Congress in New York, which
drew some 700 writers from around the world, Susan Sontag described Nadine Gordimer as "the most important writer working in the world today." With yesterday morning's announcement, it seems that the Royal Swedish Academy -- at least for 1991 -- has concurred.

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