"Nothing I write in such factual pieces will be as true as my fiction," Nadine Gordimer asserts in the opening essay of Living in Hope and History. It's hard to think of any line that would inspire less confidence in a book of nonfiction. But the author, after all, is a Nobel laureate, an antiapartheid activist, an African National Congress member, and a public figure of unimpeachable moral seriousness--and her warning is no piece of postmodern playfulness. Instead she means to draw an important distinction between genres. Nonfiction, in Gordimer's view, issues from her own political agenda, while her transcendent aim in fiction is to represent the way things are. The two impulses may overlap, of course, but they are seldom congruent. She's quick to acknowledge that writers can't truly escape politics, nor would it be desirable if they could. Still, writes Gordimer, "the transformation of the imagination must never 'belong' to any establishment, however just, fought-for, and longed-for."

What this collection offers, then, is not art itself but the record of one woman's fierce dedication to both her art and her politics--and her attempts to negotiate the relationship between them. Living in Hope and History includes graduation addresses, lectures, the author's Nobel acceptance speech, impressively learned essays on Joseph Roth and Günter Grass, and even her correspondence with Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe. Dating from the dark old days of apartheid through the present, the assemblage also offers a moving document of the South African struggle and its eventual fruits. Some of the most exhilarating pieces chronicle the new, postapartheid nation--"The First Time" finds Gordimer standing in voting queues for her country's first democratic elections, and "Act Two: One Year Later" is a celebration of Johannesburg's newfound vibrancy. Living in Hope and History is first and foremost a record of Gordimer's life as a public figure. In these essays, however, the political and the imaginative seem to sound a common, joyful note: this is the way things are, this is the way things should be. --Mary Park


From Publishers Weekly
Nobel literature laureate Gordimer (The House Gun, etc.) has collected decades' worth of erudite essays and lectures about literature, culture, human rights and, of course, her work and home ground of South Africa. The first essay, a 1988 effort on fiction, morals and politics, lays out the distinction between political partisanship in her nonfiction and "the free transformation of reality" in what she refers to as her more "true" fiction. As essays, these writings shouldn't be expected to attain the nuance and depth of Gordimer's best fiction, but some of them are devastating, such as a 1966 piece on how South African black writers were being banned while whites were offered lectures called "Know the African." The more recent pieces deftly capture what she calls "the epic of our transformation": South Africa's first democratic election, she writes, "has the meaning of people coming into their own." Still, it troubles her that writers she admiresAHungary's Joseph Roth, Milan Kundera, Czeslaw MiloszAhave rejected the leftist politics to which she remains committed. Unfortunately, this book lacks Gordimer's up-to-date reckoning with the fate of South Africa's Left, not to mention the more autobiographical reflections readers might desire. Still, this literary world citizen ranges widely (there are essays on Senghor, Grass and Mahfouz), musing thoughtfully about the sociocultural "givens" that a writer and reader must share. In her 1991 Nobel Prize lecture, Gordimer asserted that "the writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties." Though it is a tough credo to live up to, these essays are the work of a tough-minded, morally rigorous writer who has managed to do it. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA-This collection of nonfiction pieces, written for the most part in the 1980s and 1990s, takes a tough, uncompromising look at the moral interplay between literature and politics. Gordimer's essays, lectures, speeches, and commentaries address such subjects as G?nter Grass, Joseph Roth, Naguib Mahfouz, Nelson Mandela, apartheid, censorship, and human rights. Yet, all of the pieces have one overriding theme: writers must, as she quotes Salman Rushdie, "speak the unspeakable," so that they may help the rest of us take a moral stand with certainty and conviction. Although Gordimer's nonfiction generally does not have the same power and accessibility as her fiction, there is much here for teenage readers, especially those young people developing a strong sense of moral outrage at the political injustices of the world.Robert Saunderson, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Gordimer on her very public role as both novelist and political observer. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Gordimer is the first to admit that nothing she writes in her factual pieces is as "true" as her fiction. This collection of speeches, political essays, commentaries, and articles does not have the power and intimacy of the short stories and novels for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Her voice here is often distant, dry, self-conscious. Yet, as in her other popular nonfiction collections, The Essential Gesture (1988) and Writing and Being (1995), she speaks with the authority of the insider, both participant and observer, bearing witness to what it has been like, as a white citizen and writer, to live in Johannesburg through the worst days of apartheid, then in the years of transition, and now in a time of hope and history. In the best pieces, the particulars are eloquent. "A Morning in the Library" (1975) describes the madness of apartheid censorship that banned works by just about every great writer, including Gordimer herself. "The First Time" (1994) tells what it was like to stand in long lines in her country's first democratic elections. Her focus is always on politics and literature: she is vehement that fiction cannot toe any line. Hazel Rochman

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Meditations on fiction, morality, and politics by the Nobel laureate.

The writer sometimes must risk both the state's indictment of treason, and the liberation forces' complaint of lack of blind commitment. As a human being, no writer can stoop to the lie of Manichean "balance." The devil always has lead in his shoes, when placed on his side of the scale. Yet . . . the writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges toward justice just ahead of Yeats's beast slouching to be born.

-from the 1991 Nobel Prize Lecture

Internationally celebrated for her novels, Nadine Gordimer has devoted much of her life and fiction to the political struggles of the Third World, the New World, and her native South Africa. Living in Hope and History is an on-the-spot record of her years as a public figure-an observer of apartheid and its aftermath, a member of the ANC, and the champion of dissident writers everywhere. Including her reminiscences of Nelson Mandela and G￯﾿ﾽnter Grass, her correspondence with the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, and her reflections on race in Africa and America, these passionate writings lay bare the preoccupations of a lifetime.

FROM THE CRITICS

Penelope Mesic

Living in Hope and Historywritten over five decades, resolutely held a mirror to the countless shameful examples of injustice and dishonesty that together made up separatism.
Book Magazine March/April 2000

Publishers Weekly

Nobel literature laureate Gordimer (The House Gun, etc.) has collected decades' worth of erudite essays and lectures about literature, culture, human rights and, of course, her work and home ground of South Africa. The first essay, a 1988 effort on fiction, morals and politics, lays out the distinction between political partisanship in her nonfiction and "the free transformation of reality" in what she refers to as her more "true" fiction. As essays, these writings shouldn't be expected to attain the nuance and depth of Gordimer's best fiction, but some of them are devastating, such as a 1966 piece on how South African black writers were being banned while whites were offered lectures called "Know the African." The more recent pieces deftly capture what she calls "the epic of our transformation": South Africa's first democratic election, she writes, "has the meaning of people coming into their own." Still, it troubles her that writers she admires--Hungary's Joseph Roth, Milan Kundera, Czeslaw Milosz--have rejected the leftist politics to which she remains committed. Unfortunately, this book lacks Gordimer's up-to-date reckoning with the fate of South Africa's Left, not to mention the more autobiographical reflections readers might desire. Still, this literary world citizen ranges widely (there are essays on Senghor, Grass and Mahfouz), musing thoughtfully about the sociocultural "givens" that a writer and reader must share. In her 1991 Nobel Prize lecture, Gordimer asserted that "the writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties." Though it is a tough credo to live up to, these essays are the work of a tough-minded, morally rigorous writer who has managed to do it. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Gordimer on her very public role as both novelist and political observer. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal