Synopses & Reviews
A sharply observed new novel about post-apartheid South Africa from the Nobel Prize winnerNadine Gordimer is one of our most telling contemporary writers. With each new work, she attacks—with a clear-eyed fierceness, a lack of sentimentality, and a deep understanding of the darkest depths of the human soul—her eternal themes: the inextricable link between personal and communal history; the inescapable moral ambiguities of daily life; the political and racial tensions that persist in her homeland, South Africa. And in each new work is fresh evidence of her literary genius: in the sharpness of her psychological insights, the stark beauty of her language, the complexity of her characters, and the difficult choices with which they are faced.
In No Time Like the Present, Gordimer trains her keen eye on Steve and Jabulile, an interracial couple living in a newly, tentatively, free South Africa. They have a daughter, Sindiswa; they move to the suburbs; Steve becomes a lecturer at a university; Jabulile trains to become a lawyer; there is another child, a boy this time. There is nothing so extraordinary about their lives, and yet, in telling their story and the stories of their friends and families, Gordimer manages to capture the tortured, fragmented essence of a nation struggling to define itself post-apartheid.
The subject is contemporary, but Gordimers treatment is, as ever, timeless. In No Time Like the Present, she shows herself once again a master novelist, at the height of her prodigious powers.
Review
Praise for Nadine Gordimer: “On nearly every page theres evidence of Gordimers intellectual rigor, as well as the upright discipline all serious writers possess.” —Stephanie Zacharek, Los Angeles Times
Review
“
No Time Like the Present is Gordimers best novel since her first,
The Lying Days.”---Susan Salter Reynolds,
Newsday “To read
No Time Like the Present is to plunge into the cauldron that is South Africa today.... Although she is eighty-eight, Gordimer has all the enthusiasm of youth as she celebrates what she sees all around her. Her approach is kaleidoscopic.”---
Los Angeles Times “Gordimer sees history, power, and a gnawing desire for something secular yet entwined in every mundane gesture. The personal remains political even when the great political fight has been won.”---Maureen Corrigan, NPR “Every once in a while, you begin to read a book and suddenly realize you are experiencing greatness. This is such a book….There are few, if any, writers today who can match Nadine Gordimer….May she never stop.”---
The Washington Times
Synopsis
“A perfect example of what literature can give us that history books cannot.”—Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice Steve and Jabulile, once clandestine lovers under a racist law forbidding sexual relations between black and white, are living in a newly free South Africa. Both were combatants in the struggle against apartheid, and now, he, a university lecturer, and she, a lawyer, are parents of children born in freedom. But as the ideals of this “better life for all” are challenged by the realities of the world around them, Steve and Jabulile consider leaving the country they so vehemently fought to free.
The subject in No Time Like the Present is contemporary, but Nadine Gordimers treatment is, as ever, timeless. In the telling of this conflicted couple, she captures the fragmented essence of a nation.
About the Author
Nadine Gordimer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, is the author of fourteen novels, more than ten volumes of stories, and three nonfiction collections. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.