Nadine Gordimer has been doing some rereading lately. Since last November, when the 83-year-old Nobel laureate first convened with Colm Tóibín and Elaine Showalter, her fellow judges on the second Man Booker International Prize committee, she has read through a small library of work by the 15 finalists, from Don DeLillo and Doris Lessing to Carlos Fuentes and Alice Munro.
The winner will be announced early next month. “I made a plan to read, say, the first two books by each author, one a bit further on, and then the book I thought was the work,” says Gordimer of her judging strategy. “Then I’d catch up to the modern day. So I could see a progression.” It was a labor of love, she says, but it led to a minor discovery.
“In two cases, the book I thought was the book turned out to be even more extraordinary than I remembered, because I had changed,” says Gordimer, sitting in a hotel suite in New York, where she has traveled from South Africa for the PEN World Voices Festival. “I had lived more,” she continues, “I had experienced more. And there were things in those books that I understood now, that I didn’t then. If you read a book at your age now, read it again in 20 years, and you’ll get something else.”
At Gordimer’s age, if they are lucky to have lived so long, many writers have stopped writing, or at least reassessing older books. But, stubbornly, Gordimer has refused to stop evolving. Born in 1923 in Springs, Transvaal, she read her way into political awareness. Not much later, she wrote her way into anti-racist activism, winning the Booker Prize for her 1974 novel, “The Conservationist.” When apartheid fell apart, it was speculated that her work would lose a certain vitality. Yet since 1994, the year South Africa had its first free elections, she has published eight books, adapting her focus, again, as the country’s problems shifted to the AIDS epidemic, poverty and crime.
Sitting on a sofa in her hotel suite, dressed in elegant shades of cream and gray, her hair expertly coiffed, she hardly presents the portrait of such a flexible artist. She has perfect posture and a sharp ear. To hear her speak is to experience a powerful generational dissonance: The clipped diction and perfect sentence structure have become a thing of the past, but her concerns – guns, the Virginia Tech shooting, the war in Iraq, South Africa’s creaking move forward – could be ripped from the headlines.
“Graham Greene said, ‘Wherever you live, whatever the form of violence is there, it becomes simply part of your life and the way you live,’ ” says Gordimer.
Surprising similarities
And so it has been with her and the gun. She was spooked to discover resonances between the Virginia Tech shooting and her 1998 novel “The House Gun,” in which a young man is driven to a crime of passion. What she omits is that in other fiction – “Get a Life,” in 2005 – she predicted something else. Last autumn, she was attacked in her home by three unarmed intruders, who robbed her of cash. “These men should have something better to do than to rob two old ladies,” she said at the time.
Gordimer seems to take this event in her stride, refusing to allow it to spoil her notion of her country. “I think we were a little surprised by how much would have to happen after the change,” she says of life after apartheid. “We had the apartheid walls coming down, and we had parties, and then we had to face each other – and I must say it was with a lot of courage and determination. Many things are wrong, but a great many things have been done to overcome the past in South Africa. But we now have the headache of the morning after.”
There have been less painful adaptations, however, like the emergence of voices that were almost silenced by apartheid. At the PEN festival, she repeatedly championed the work of the Johannesburg-born poet and novelist Mongane Wally Serote. During his youth, besides writing poetry and fiction, he was active in the militant arm of the African National Congress. According to Gordimer, he was nearly assassinated on several occasions. Serote spent some time in the U.S., then came back to South Africa to become part of the first freely elected government. “You know, from the bush into parliament,” Gordimer says. “Nothing could be more different.”
One subject on which Gordimer refuses to be re-educated is Günter Grass. The furor over revelations last year in his autobiography that he was a teenage soldier in the SS has not moved her to reassess her friend or his work. In fact, she finds the controversy symptomatic of a culture addicted to scandal but lacking context. “If Günter Grass in 1944, when Hitler knew he was losing the war, if he said I won’t go, he simply would have been killed,” she says, her eyes fierce. “And why did he keep quiet about it? Well, he didn’t keep quiet about… If you read his books, the wonderful knowledge of what happened to people – he never would have had it if he hadn’t gone through that experience … I cannot feel any blame is due to him for what circumstance unavoidably pressed upon him. He could not refuse.”
Unlike fellow Nobel laureates such as Grass, Wole Soyinka or Dario Fo, all of whom have published memoirs that revisit their political education, Gordimer will not be following suit, now or ever. “I don’t like to talk of things that my husband and I did as activists,” she says, her face crinkling into a frown. “As a writer, three of my books were banned. But I lacked that final courage to go to the front line. So for me, to write such a book, it would require examining my private life and revealing it, and I feel that has got nothing to do with anybody else. And to me, all that could be of any interest of my existence in this world to other people is my books.”
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
