Novelists From South Africa

"There seemed nothing to do but live."

"I could live here forever, he thought, or till I die. Nothing would happen, every day would be the same as the day before, there would be nothing to say. The anxiety that belonged to the time on the road began to leave him. Sometimes, as he walked, he did not know whether he was awake or asleep. He could understand that people should have retreated here and fenced themselves in with miles and miles of silence; he could understand that they should have wanted to bequeath the privilege of so much silence to their children and grandchildren in perpetuity (though by what right he was not sure); he wondered whether there were not forgotten corners and angles and corridors between the fences, land that belonged to no one yet. Perhaps if one flew high enough, he thought, one would be able to see."

"This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere."

"I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the capital, of groping my way out to the ruins in the desert, of returning to the confinement of my cell, of seeking out the barbarians and offering myself to them to use as they wish."

"I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we would learn to respect them."

"How can I believe that a bed is anything but a bed, a woman’s body anything but a site of joy? I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! I will not suffer for his crimes!"

"I search for secrets and answers, no matter how bizarre, like an old woman reading tea-leaves."

"There is nothing to link me with torturers, people who sit waiting like beetles in dark cellars."

"We have been here more than a hundred years, we have reclaimed land from the desert and built irrigation works and planted fields and built solid homes and put a wall around our town, but they still think of us as visitors, transients."

"But more often in the very act of caressing her I am overcome with sleep as if polelaxed, fall into oblivion sprawled upon her body, and wake an hour or two later dizzy, confused, thirsty. These dreamless spells are like death to me, or enchantment, black, outside time."

"It is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation."

"It would be best if this obscure chapter in the history of the world were terminated at once, if these ugly people were obliterated from the face of the earth and we swore to make a new start, to run an empire in which there would be no more injustice, no more pain."

"It would cost little to march them out into the desert . . . to have them dig, with their last strength, a pit large enough for all of them to lie in (or even dig it for them!), and, leaving them buried there forever and forever, to come back to the walled town full of new intentions, new resolutions.”"

"How can I accept that disaster has overtaken my life when the world continues to move so tranquilly through its cycles?"

"Somewhere, always, a child is being beaten."

"Truly, man was not made to live alone!"

"Futile bitterness, idle melancholy, empty regrets."

"I find myself wondering too whether he has a private ritual of purification, carried out behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread with other men.”"

"Truly the world should belong to singers and dancers."

"Will we live to regret this blood spent so lavishly on the sand?"

"Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of a dependent people, I was opposed to civilization..."

"The new men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I thought it worth the trouble."

"The activity of writing, then, is not to be distinguished from the activity of self-exploration. It consists in contemplating the sea of internal images, discerning connections, and setting these out in grammatical sentences (“I could never conceive of a network of meaning too complex to be expressed in a series of grammatical sentences,” says Murnane, whose views on grammar are firm, even pedantic.)"

"Light in tone, the novel [Murphy] is Beckett’s response to the therapeutic orthodoxy that the patient should learn to engage with the larger world on the world’s terms."

"A dictum [Beckett] quotes from his favourite philosopher, the second-generation Cartesian Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669) suggests his overall stance toward the political: ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis, which may be glossed: Don’t invest hope or longing in an arena where you have no power."

"To any thinking person, it must be obvious that there is something badly wrong in relations between human beings and the animals that human beings rely on for food; and that in the past 100 or 150 years whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge scale, as traditional animal husbandry has been turned into an industry using industrial methods of production. … It would be a mistake to idealise traditional animal husbandry as the standard by which the animal-products industry falls short: traditional animal husbandry is brutal enough, just on a smaller scale. A better standard by which to judge both practices would be the simple standard of humanity: is this truly the best that human beings are capable of?"

"As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calendar. Like May 1 or July 14 or December 25, September 11 may seem full of significance to some people, while to other people it is just another day."

"[Being peppered with invitations to travel far and wide to give lectures] has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world."

"In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. (It has always struck me as strange, by the way, that Alfred Nobel did not institute a philosophy prize, or for that matter that he instituted a physics prize but not a mathematics prize, to say nothing of a music prize - music is, after all, more universal than literature, which is bound to a particular language.) The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role."

"It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from ‘the wise man’s mouth’ but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth."

"Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether."

"Whatever happens to him, whatever he has done … he can come to us. There’s nothing you cannot tell us. We’re always there for you. Always."

"Once Jews no longer obeyed the imperatives of their religion, they were virtually obliged to create new forms of identity, turning accommodation from means to end. Literature was a proving ground for the reinvention of the self. One-tenth of the Nobel Prize winners for literature in the twentieth century were born Jews, but only two of them-Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1966) and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978)-wrote in a Jewish language and only about half thought of themselves as Jews. Paul Heyse (1910), Nellie Sachs (1966), and Elias Canetti (1981) wrote in German; Henri Bergson (1927) in French; Boris Pasternak (1958) and Joseph Brodsky (1987) in Russian; and Saul Bellow (1976) and Nadine Gordimer (1991) in English."

"She writes marvelous novels"

"She remained true to her art but she also knew that the politics of struggle gave energy to her art; she was born on the other side of the colour line, but she built bridges across it. Speaking truth to power was the real power of her art. She may have passed on, but her 90 years among us were a blessing. Her presence and energy are forever alive in my memory. She remains a kindred spirit for, beyond the writing and activism, she was an unwavering supporter of writing in African languages. The quantity and quality of her literary output – from short stories and novels to essays – earned her many awards but, in the end, the biggest award for her was the affection and the respect she got from people of all races in South Africa and across the globe. Her written words will forever be an integral part of the collective memory of the world."

"Politics, both large and small-scale, was Nadine's subject. Speaking the truth was her passion. She wrote about injustices not only in the bad old days, but in the new. She was a model of what an engaged writer can achieve, and that's what makes her my hero."

""No one knows where the end of suffering will begin," writes Nadine Gordimer about the 1976 Soweto schoolchildren's uprising in her novel Burger's Daughter."

"(whom of those you have read recently have you found impressive?) AO: The South Africans: Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and André Brink."

"Nadine Gordimer writes about black people with such astounding sensibilities and sensitivity-not patronizing, not romantic, just real. And Eudora Welty does the same thing. Lillian Hellman has done it. Now, we might categorize these women as geniuses of a certain sort, but if they can write about it, it means that it is possible. They didn't say, "Oh, my God, I can't write about black people"; it didn't stop them. There are white people who do respond that way though, assuming there's some huge barrier. But if you can relate to Beowolf and Jesus Christ when you read about them, it shouldn't be so difficult to relate to black literature."

"If ever a writer had a grasp of the umbilical connection between individual experience and historical possibility, it's Nadine Gordimer. The miracle of the Nobel prize is not only that someone got it who deserved it, but that the writer of our century who portrays most insistently how people wrestle with, resist and create political change was rewarded for her vision. An existentialist with an emphasis on both political commitment and efficacy, Gordimer is one of the few writers to depict the activist life. No surprise then to find her quoting Camus: "It is from the moment when I shall no longer be more than a writer that I shall cease to write." So far it's not a problem. A leftist publicly critical of communism since the early eighties, she named the challenge "to love truth enough, to pick up the blood-dirtied, shamed cause of the left, and attempt to recreate it in accordance with what it was meant to be, not what sixty-five years of human power-perversion have made of it." Comparisons with Doris Lessing, that other vast-minded leftist white woman writer from Southern Africa (Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia), seem inevitable; but Lessing left Africa and political vision. Gordimer stayed...Typical Gordimer to come out with the word, and with the truth of the character's fleeting but not trivial dilemma; typical to mix farts with colonialism. Nothing is off limits, but she's no cynic. A fierce moralist who insists on change, Gordimer summons us to our best selves: "There is no forgetting how we could live if only we could find the way. We must continue to be tormented by the ideal.""

"In South Africa, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Albie Sachs, Nadine Gordimer, Abie Nathan, and Helen Suzman are only among the most famous of the many Jews who joined the fight to bring down apartheid."

"In the course of an impressive four-decade-long career, the Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer has mapped and remapped the spiritual and psychological landscape of South Africa."

"The South African Jewish author Nadine Gordimer, who died on Sunday, July 13, at age 90, expressed an even-handed humanism throughout her literary career. This is far from the case for every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which Gordimer was accorded in 1991. Her scrupulous sense of fairness, which motivated her to oppose apartheid in her native land, also led her in 2008 to resist strident calls to boycott a Jerusalem writers’ conference. Instead, Gordimer accepted the invitation from Mishkenot Sha’ananim, determined to meet with Palestinians and Israelis because the literary festival was meant to “assert vitally that whatever violent, terrible, bitter and urgent chasms of conflict lie between peoples, the only solutions for peace and justice exist and must begin with both sides talking to one another…I shall do my utmost to uphold the principles and practice I have held, and still hold, at home in our country.”"

"Nadine Gordimer's work is endowed with an emotional genius so palpable one experiences it like a finger pressing steadily upon the prose."

"Because I have known so many different writers I have often thought about what generosity means in a writer. Sometimes, as with other people you meet, you can tell about a writer at once. Though I only met her on one occasion I knew immediately that Nadine Gordimer was an enormously likeable, generous and admirable person, and that is what I felt over many years reading her work."

"Nadine Gordimer helped me see how fiction writing can illuminate reality"

"As a writer and as a human being, Nadine Gordimer responded with exemplary courage and creative energy to the great challenge of her times, the system of apartheid unjustly and heartlessly imposed on the South African people. Looking to the great realist novelists of the 19th century as models, she produced a body of work in which the South Africa of the late 20th century is indelibly recorded for all time."

"I will always be grateful for the presence in the world of Nadine Gordimer, who has delivered in literature a South Africa most of us could not have known without her."

"I believe that women writers have not engaged or been allowed to participate in the discourse of official remembrance and that this is why their literature has been able to capture the frailty of the human spirit as well as its depth. Women writers who have contributed to the softness of remembrance can be traced from the early diary writings of young Anne Frank, to the visionary human rights declaration of Eleanor Roosevelt, and finally, to the powerful denouncing of apartheid by Nadine Gordimer."

"Presence of death standing by makes a sacrament of tenuous relationships."