Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black, and Other Stories
Nadine Gordimer Bloomsbury, 192pp, £14.99
Beefsteak tartare, bugs and Beethoven. Nadine Gordimer’s new selection of 13 short stories provides a tour through the butterfly-effect consequences of the past, the twinnings of fate and happenstance, and the trappings of identity and heredity.
Amid backdrops of sweeping social change – apartheid, the Holocaust – Gordimer’s stories explore the subjectivity of experience, imagining alternative pasts and alternative endings. Susan Sontag and Edward Said share a meal at a Chinese restaurant in New York (the NS published this tale last January); the memory of an ancient parrot blossoms as he recalls quarrels overheard; a middle-aged South African academic scours the townships for mixed-race cousins – the “collaterals” of an imagined, sexually virile great-grandfather.
With a sensitivity both pensive and nostalgic, Gordimer writes with bitter beauty and insightful fluidity, hinging meaning on minutiae. Tiny moments – a letter found, a cockroach discovered – spiral into intricate stories. Exploring the dimensions of time, the cumulative effect of past events and the non-linearity of experience shared, these stories postulate: “Finality? That’s the mistake. It’s the claim of dictatorship.”
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