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5.0 out of 5 stars
Unfinished business , 13 Oct 2008
An air of the surreal weaves through some of the stories in this intriguing collection of short fiction. As an astute and engaged observer of social realities at home and globally, South African Nadine Gordimer brilliantly captures ordinary people's lives as they attempt to make sense of it, more or less successfully. And then, there is usually an unexpected twist towards the end of each story - some giving a future perspective in a different voice, inviting the reader to ponder varied possibilities.
Nadine Gordimer, multiple award winner, including of the Nobel Prize in 1991, is well known and admired for her short fiction. Here, she brings together a novella, a number of portraits of normal people with very brief fragments or musings based around a specific news event, such as a tsunami in the title story, "Loot". "The Generation Gap" is a light hearted, ironic look at the squabbles of grown-up children about their widowed father who falls in love with a violinist of their own age. Something surreal happens with a group of professors in "Look Alike", another tongue in cheek story, yet with an allegoric message. The novella "The Mission Statement" is the most traditional of the stories in the collection. The central figure is a middle-aged English foreign aid worker experiencing her first African assignment. Her story is a surprising departure from the rest of the collection, both in tone and substance: very down to earth and, despite the intended surprise ending, completely realistic.
"Karma", the final segment is in itself a collection of vignettes, held together by a linking voice - that of a forever returning spirit-child. Anybody who has read the hauntingly beautiful The Famished Road by Booker Prize winner, Ben Okri, will remember the importance of the spirit-child in African cultures. Gordimer introduces such a spirit, develops it into one that is capable of memory and learning, who returns again and again, initially as an afterthought sprinkled into some of the short pieces. Yet in "Karma", it takes an important reflective role, linking the individual vignettes together. She expands the concept of "karma", building around it some of the most evocative pieces in the whole collection: love, race, relationships, society's explicit or implicit restrictions. As the title suggests, Hindu beliefs are also reflected upon by the returning spirit. The question remains at the end whether the need to return to the world to overcome the faults or weaknesses of the previous life does not in itself lead to "an unfinished business".
Gordimer's language is spare and efficient, her people descriptions vivid and precise. The detached tone and approach she demonstrates to her subjects does, however, not deny them emotional depth. Oblique references to brutality and conflict during the Apartheid period in South Africa are interwoven with the lives of her characters, in some cases contrasted with the post-Apartheid potential for a new beginning or ending. Nevertheless the stories reach beyond their locale in addressing common human aspirations and preoccupations. All of them leave room for the reader to ponder and expand on ideas and questions raised. [Friederike Knabe]
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