All Alone in the New South Africa

My first Nadine Gordimer novel - a book club selection - was None to Accompany Me, a transitional novel. It came just a few years after she won the Nobel Prize, and in the midst of the stupendous upheaval that accompanied the end of apartheid and white hegemony. The novel is set in this tumultuous time and details several lives, but concentrates on Vera Stark, a strong and practical lawyer who has worked for black land rights.

Hers isn't an uplifting tale, although it is a sensual one. A woman deeply in touch with her sexuality, she left her soldier husband for a sexy artist who takes his place, and continues to find sex with her husband and a new lover powerful and fulfilling. (Though much of this is told in flashback) She's not so good at the emotional level though, and the intensity of her lover/husband's need for her repels her, as do the intimacies of her children and other family friends. She is passionately independent: having none to accompany her is her choice, not that of those around her.

But beyond Vera, this is a novel - written in the immediacy of the moment, coming out the year of the election that brought Nelson Mandela's ANC to power - about lives in flux, about how victory up-ends expected roles, and brings both expected and unexpected change.

The book got a fairly sour review during our club's discussion, and I think that is both fair and unfair. This is a difficult book to like; however, I think that it gains power when thought of in the context of when it was written and pubished. And I think that its very difficulties, the challenges, matter as well. That said, I hear July's People is a more auspicious pick.