“Is Gordimer Out of Time?”: Mary Corrigall Opens the Sunday Independent Political Novel Debate
Last month, Mary Corrigall, Books Editor of the Sunday Independent, initiated a debate on the state of the political novel, sparked by the furore over Brett Murray’s The Spear.
Corrigall opened the discussion with a review of Nadine Gordimer’s No Time Like the Present in which she argues that Gordimer is, supposedly to her detriment, “unable to locate herself outside of activism”:
After the country went to the polls in the first democratic elections of 1994, a line was drawn, delineating what the country had been and what it would become. This socio-political rupture between the past and present was to some degree artificial; it also implied an erasure. In No Time Like the Present (Picador Africa), Gordimer expresses this temporal break in the form of a compelling motif of a motorbike ripping “the street like a sheet of paper roughly torn.”
This everyday event has momentous significance for the Reeds – Steve and Jabu – for the simple fact that it coincides with Steve’s suggestion that the family move into the suburbs. For the Reeds transplanting their lives in the suburbs is a politically loaded act; after years of living under the radar as not only an interracial couple, but as Umkhonto operatives taking up residence in the suburbs implies that they are being reaggregated into a society with which they were once at war.
Book details
- No Time Like the Present by Nadine Gordimer
EAN: 9781770102590
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Apr
Please register or log in to comment