I remember the first story of Lionel?s that I ever read: Down Upon The Green Grass I believe it was entitled ? and it was set at the Zoo Lake.
I was at once delighted with its sensuous freshness, frankness, down-to-earth humour and unsentimental tenderness.
Lionel became and is a milestone in the turbulent emergence of a South African literature. He has forged his own unique talents in fiction, poetry and literary criticism out of the experience of his own life and the impacts of the complex social and political changes that surrounded him and all of us in our country.
And certainly for me, nothing could come near my great admiration for Lionel?s writing, unsparingly honest and adventurous in the hidden places of being, putting himself and us all to the test of what it means to be fully human.
Those many, many readers for whom Felix Greenspan was a classic companion of youth, as a JD Salinger character was to young Americans, have waited far too long, it seems, to hear what has happened to Felix since. But a writer must be allowed to take his or her own time, which is different from the reader?s time, the span a book takes to be read, in contrast to what may be a gestation in the nature of an elephant?s, several times over. A work of the imagination is organic, it develops along with the writer before it gets committed to paper or ? these days I suppose ? computer.
Reading The White Life of Felix Greenspan, I was overcome by the way Felix, within his creator?s extraordinary skills and insight at their uncompromising peak, again and again rescues the life-affirmative spirit from the most appalling circumstances. Marcel Proust wrote: ?Never be afraid to go too far, for the truth lies there.? Lionel Abrahams in this work of his maturity is never afraid to do so. The often unadmitted depths of sexuality, the power of contesting political beliefs ? the decisive effect these have on the human personality and actions ? are blazingly alive in this book, to illuminate us about ourselves and others. And there is beauty in the free style and structure of the narrative ? in Abrahams? own words, I quote: ?glittering splinters of narrative under a shadow of lost time … and secrecy?.
This is an edited version of Nadine Gordimer?s address at the launch of The White Life of Felix Greenspan.