This weekend's New York Times Sunday Book Review features two of South Africa's literary giants. Novelist Siddhartha Deb reviews Nadine Gordimer's new book, Beethoven Was One Sixteenth Black and Other Stories. A taste, from Deb's conclusion:
These stories aren't mere exercises. Even as variations, with a fixed set of characters confronting similar situations, they create discrete, pulsating worlds. None of the characters are aware that their situations echo a common theme. Their lives are unique, and the endings they stumble toward are all-encompassing, complete, inevitable. It is Gordimer's special skill that she can both make us feel the distinct yearnings of these characters, where nothing else matters, and allow us to stand back and perceive the parts they play in a larger collective pattern. As she always has, Gordimer offers her readers a rare combination of intimacy and transcendence.
In the same edition of the book review Rachel Donadio contributes an essay in which she speculates as to why JM Coetzee left South Africa for Australia:
Why would a novelist who has written so powerfully about the land of his birth pack up and leave? Were his 2002 move and his taking of Australian citizenship last year a betrayal of his homeland, or a rejoinder to a country whose new government had denounced one of his most important novels as racist? Was it just another example of the "white flight" that has sent hundreds of thousands of generally affluent South Africans to other Anglophone countries since the end of apartheid? Or was it a tacit acknowledgment that Coetzee had exhausted his South African material, that the next chapter in the country's history was the rise of the black middle class, and what did an old resistance writer, with his aloof, middle-aged white narrators, know about that?
Many see in Coetzee's departure the fissures in the new South Africa. Coetzee is renowned for his reticence, and thus has not provided an explanation for his departure.