Telling Times: Living and Writing 1950-2008 by Nadine Gordimer (Bloomsbury)
In the course of this collection of her essays, written over six decades, Nadine Gordimer mutters a few imprecations against intellectuals and “fingerling” literary critics. I suspect these jabs indicate an ideological opposition between intellectual and creative activity. And of course she places herself firmly in the latter category, declaring in her famous essay “Living in the Interregnum” (included here) that nothing she might say is as true as her fiction.
But these pieces reveal that Gordimer is a formidable intellectual and a literary critic of sharp perception and deep empathy. She has read hugely, from the 19th-century Russians to DH Lawrence, from György Lukács to Roland Barthes, and her views on South African literature are invaluable, perhaps mostly because they come from a fiction writer and not a professional critic or academic.
The same goes for her reviews of work by such writers as JM Coetzee, the two Roths (Joseph and Philip), and even Ernest Hemingway, about whom she is particularly acute. She even manages to enliven a piece with the deadly conference title “The Status of the Writer in the World Today” and some may be surprised to find travel pieces in this book, on Botswana, the Congo, and an odd, delightful, vignette about a prefabricator of mosques (Hassan in America).
Gordimer has also said she would not write an autobiography, but the pieces in Telling Times that recount her youth in Springs, for instance, or her relationship with her parents and her growth as a writer tell us a great deal about her, her times and her work. One can only laugh when she recounts, in a self-interview, how she overheard her son (then about eight) responding to a friend who asked what his mother did for a living. Basing his reply on what he could hear of his mother’s working life, he said: “She’s a typist.” — Shaun de Waal