No Time Like the Present
A Novel
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3.8 • 32 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A sharply observed new novel about post-apartheid South Africa from the Nobel Prize winner
Nadine 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 Gordimer's 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nobel laureate Gordimer's latest novel (after the story collection Life Times), set in contemporary South Africa, revolves around Steve, who's Jewish, and Jabulile (Jabu), who's black. Both were "comrades" in the fight for racial equality (Steve used his industrial chemistry degree to make explosives "to blow up the regime"; Jabu spent three months in a Johannesburg prison for her work with the "Freedom Fighters from South Africa.") Married and starting a family in a middle-class suburb, they've "bought ourselves a house while others including comrades... are still under tin and cardboard." With the "Struggle" seemingly behind them, all that remains is to repair their broken country, Steve as a college professor concerned with the continued lack of educational equality, Jabu as a lawyer working for justice. But as their children grow up, civil and political unrest keeps pace, forcing them to re-evaluate their position in this new South Africa. Gordimer's novel is teeming with fascinating descriptions of the postapartheid zeitgeist, but rushed along by a breathless narrative that makes any examination of the relationships between characters difficult, and ultimately keeps them from becoming anything more than political avatars.
