The story that hasnt been chosen to be told

Reviewed by SHERIDAN GRISWOLD
Correspondent | Friday September 5, 2008 00:00

 

Nadine Gordimer is 85 years old in November. She was first published 70 years ago and began writing 76 years ago. Her Nobel Prize for literature was awarded in 1991. Her writing matures and improves with age. Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black is a collection of 14 short stories and each of them is an exquisite gem. Often a writers compilation of short stories published previously in a variety of magazines constitutes a mixed assemblage, but not for Nadine Gordimer. This is her 10th volume of short stories and she obviously loves the form and is a master. Her 15th novel was Get a Life (Mmegi 24 March 2006).

Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black is the first and title story for this volume. It was previously published in Granta 92 (Mmegi, 21 April 2006). It explores the need to claim some African blood - is this the new discrimination? A few others of the stories here I had read before in The New Yorker. They are still as fresh as ever on the re-reading. They are full of humour, insight, twists and turns and surprises, delving deep into the complexities of human nature and the secrets and revelations hidden in peoples lives. Though most are grounded in Africa, many encompass identities and networks that spread across the globe. Where betrayal has occurred love and waiting often transcends the pain.

In allesverloren or all is lost a woman seeks to understand her husband who has died. When they were courting he confessed to actions that she had let lie, never probing to find out what they meant and why. But now that he is dead she wants someone to talk to who would understand her need. Grief is a language that reaches no-ones ears ... everyone fears death but no-one admits to the fear of grief. His secret involved a man in London, The photographer - well of course -had an unexpected lens on life. Could they talk? Would it help her in her grief?

The theme of loss and discovery is explored further in a beneficiary where Charlotte, better known to her friends as Charlie, seeks to find her father. Her mother, Laila de Morne, an unfulfilled actress, has died. Her father, who was divorced from Laila when she was four, is a neurosurgeon. But is he really her father? He believed in the one chance of conception that single night of the party. Lailas farewell. Laila was Laila so it was not unexpected to discover after her mothers passing that a great actor, Rendall Harris, might really be her father. Charlie is now 28. Harris is returning to South Africa after an exile of 25 years. For every performance in which he is billed she takes a seat in the middle of the second row, the first would be to obvious.

Everyone has a history, even an African parrot named Auguste. For over 30 years he has been the star attraction in a popular restaurant in a village in southern France. He will take the titbit and continue to grumble with quiet indignation to himself while apparently listening acutely to all around him, for as suddenly as he flew into a rage he enters unbidden across all the conversations the clichs of his vocabulary over the clichs of theirs.

The story Tape measure appeared in Deadalus. Perhaps because I have an aversion to worms, having had them and shed them, I find my squeamishness interferes with my appreciation of this tale. All power to Jimmy Carter, and those who have joined him in the crusade, for their 99 percent conquering of the Guinea - worm blight in Africa.

Grandmother is a groupie might also have been the title for frivolous woman. How do you judge the life of a woman who was able to flee Hitler, when for Old Grete everything was a party? What do you make of her returning to Germany at the worst of times, when she did not have to go back? She brought out an old steamer trunk full of memorabilia, she rescued this junk to bring along while others like her were transported in cattle trucks. What was the meaning of her life? Can her heirs now sort this out? The past is a foreign country.

Cross-cultural relationships are unraveled in a number of stories. In mother-tongue she is German and he is South African. He had a foreign affair.

She knew when she began to love this man that the condition would be that she would live in another country. It meant that she would have to go home with him to live in Africa. Whose mother tongue would win out?

The importance of language and the ability to communicate to those one is with is considered further in the first of three concluding short stories alternative endings. They are from Buda and Pest and leave Hungary for a sanctuary in South Africa. He has a doctorate, but does not speak English or Afrikaans, and does not learn languages easily. She is a housebound seamstress, who, through her need to communicate with her customers, acquires a collegial English that matches her charming looks. He can find a job working in the back of a supermarket managing stores, while she is transformed up and out by her linguistic capabilities.

In the second sense - hearing - a young couple survives in spite of vastly contrasting personal lifestyles. She is a computer whiz and he a concert cellist with an Amati. In her teens she had played the flute in a youth orchestra where he played too. They fell in love, married, but had no children. She was not talented, he was. He was often on tour, both within South Africa and abroad. The voice of the cello doesnt lie. She knew from his playing when he was in love with her and when he had someone else.

The most exhilarating story in the collection is Dreaming of the dead. Could you ever dream of a conversation in a Chinese restaurant between Edward Said, Susan Sontag and Anthony Sampson? Theres no climate in dream, but there is an intense political exchange. Said had a coin-clear profile. His is a shining a torch of distinctive intellectual light and sensibility to guide him. Their talk was of political conflict and scandals, policies and ideologies, corrupt governments, tyrant fundamentalists ... if Susans a Jew, she too, has identified beyond the label, hers has been one with Vietnamese, Sarajevans, many others, to make up the sum of self.

Edward Said composed music and had two grand pianos in his flat in Manhattan. Carlos Fuentes asked whether music is the true fig leaf of our shames, the final sublimation - beyond death - of our mortal visibility: beyond words? They explore the importance of their ability to have empathy, to share the pain of others. Then a sangoma arrives in Susans Chinese restaurant.

It is easy to join them there. Just read this wonderful book.

e-mail sheridangriswold@yahoo.com