Jump and Other Stories
By Nadine Gordimer
Bloomsbury. $34.95
Reviewed by Nicholas Southey
With this new collection of 16 short stories, Nadine Gordimer, South Africa's 1991 Nobel Literature Prize winner, once again displays her marvellous skill as a writer. Gordimer's novels have rightly been hailed internationally for their quality and distinction, but she is also an undoubted master of the short story form. This is her eighth anthology of short stories, and it is an exciting and powerful book.
Gordimer's main concern in almost all these stories is human relationships. She explores themes such as love, suffering, fear, insecurity, tension and brutality, often, but not always, in a situation where political repression is a dominant feature of the lives of the characters. She often does not specify the precise setting of the stories. This gives them universality, but people familiar with the South African situation will quickly recognise many of the landscapes and locations in which characters find themselves.
The emotions and experiences of a remarkable range of characters are recorded and dissected in these stories. Readers encounter the young and old, the lonely and gregarious, the guilty and innocent, the loved and rejected, wealthy and destitute, the uprooted and the established, black and white, revolutionaries and defenders of the status quo: all these, and many others, come under the scrutiny of Gordimer's searching eye. Her achievement is to probe beneath the surface and the stereotype, and to uncover the complexity and diversity of the human condition.
Many of these stories are superb. "Home" is a brilliant exploration of the stress placed on the relationship between a husband and a wife when members of the wife's family are arrested and placed in detention. As the wife examines her feelings for her mother in particular, and finds ways to reach out to her in prison, insecurity and suspicion surface in her marriage. The emotional demands of two homes force temporary choices to be made, and despite the wife's return to her husband at the end, the ability of the marriage to survive the strain placed on it is open to question.
"The moment before the gun went off" delves beneath the surface of a not unfamiliar South African scene: the fatal shooting of a black labourer by a white farmer. This particular incident is shown to have been accidental, but the sickening tragedy and horror of the episode is only revealed in the last sentence — exposing further levels of human dependence and entanglement in an already complex situation.
"Comrades" examines the levels of commitment of a wealthy liberal white woman, and her ability to communicate with and relate to the black youths of the school where she does voluntary teaching. Two vastly different worlds are brought together in the dining room of her home, where the physical hunger of the youngsters is temporarily met — but little else besides.
Human relationships are again under the spotlight in "Some are born to sweet delight". A love affair between a local girl and a foreign man is the main focus of the story. The growth of their love, the acceptance of change by the girl's parents after difficulty and tension, and the increase of trust, are developed in a controlled and conventional love story. But they are all suddenly, unexpectedly and violently shattered by the man's revolutionary act, which completely undermines the innocent basis of what has gone before.
In "A journey", political issues do not intrude in the relationship between a father, mother and their adolescent son. The connections between the three undergo profound change as a new — and unplanned — baby is born to the parents. Both the fragility and uncertainly of human love and commitment, as well as the strength of those bonds, are superbly examined in this excellent story.
I have only commented on a selection of the stories, but they give an indication of some of the themes and concerns of Gordimer. All the stories reveal the exceptional talent of one of South Africa's most accomplished writers. People who have yet to read any Nadine Gordimer stories should begin now: they will derive great satisfaction and pleasure from this collection.
[Reprinted from New Nation.]