Nadine Gordimer

What I like most about Gordimer is her ability to show multiple sides of the story. I think that this is kind of the real point of reading fiction, to be able to empathize better with other people. Gordimer could have taken the easy way out and written from the point of view of characters that are easy to empathize with, the types of characters who are seen as heroes. But she doesn’t.

The most obvious example of this is in “Six Feet of the Country”, where the man is (more or less) a pretty deplorable human being. It would probably be easier to just write him off as a waste of space, but that’s not really what Gordimer does. It’s not just that he doesn’t care about his wife or the workers, but that he does not have the capacity to understand them- he is so far ingrained in this system of oppression that he can’t even begin to think that there might be some other way. And I think this is, at heart, what most of the issues that are facing our world now (and at the time Gordimer was writing this) boil down to- it isn’t that one side is evil, it’s that they lack the capacity to understand the other.

As for the other two stories, I would be really interested to know what life was like for women in South Africa at this time. I think it’s interesting that both women, though they are very, very different, both fit into some gender stereotypes that, I think, are very common in the US, and I would be interested to see if that is something that applies in South Africa as well.

I really like Gordimer’s style of writing as well as the themes she covers, which is a little strange, because I very rarely like pieces that are as description-centric as hers are, but I feel like she has a very dry wit about her, which I like a lot. It reminds me a little of Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert (which is one of my favorite “classical” novels), though obviously there are some pretty major differences between the two, both in style and theme.