Goodbye Nadine Gordimer
(November 12, 1923 – July 14, 2014)
I’m fairly certain that I learned of Gordimer through Mari. As usual, she was so right in her recommendations. Gordimer’s work was simply beautiful, her mastery of language enviable. In 1991, Gordimer wond the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was the first South African to win, and the first woman in 25 years to win. Gordimer was an outspoken opponent of apartheid, and as a result, three of her books were banned in her country. In 1991, Los Angeles Times correspondent Scott Kraft said of Gordimer that “this unassuming, strong-willed white woman has used her manual Hermes typewriter to give the world some of the most perceptive and uncompromising works of fiction ever written about her homeland, South Africa.” After his release from prison, Nelson Mandela asked to meet with Gordimer. Here is a link to Gordimer’s essay on Nelson Mandela, which appeared in the New Yorker in 2013.
Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the Nobel Laureate:
“I’m a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can’t see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.” (from The House Gun)
“At four in the afternoon the old moon bleeds radiance into the grey sky.” (from “My Father Leaves Home”)
“The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.” (from “A Bolter and the Invincible Summer”)
“Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light — and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau — into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.” (from “Writing and Being,” Nobel Lecture, 1991)
“A desert is a place without expectation.” (from “Telling Times”)
“I never thought about the prize [Nobel] when I wrote. Writing is not a horse race.” (after learning that she had won in 1991)
Here are some links:
The Guardian’s obituary
The New York Times obituary
Obituary in The Telegraph
Online archive of short stories in The New Yorker
Art of Fiction No. 77, Paris Review (Fall 1979/Spring 1980)
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 