Nadine Gordimer Beethoven Was One-sixteenth Black

Annotation

Senses play a telling part in three of the stories in Nadine Gordimer's magnificent new collection. In one we meet a woman who can gauge the stability of her marriage by the tone of her husband's cello, and in another by the scent in the nape of her husband's neck. For one couple who emigrate to South Africa, the husband's gaze remains firmly fixed on their native Budapest, while his wife is spellbound by the visual pleasures of their new homeland. There is lively conversation amongst recently departed literary luminaries in the Chinese restaurant of "Dreaming of the Dead", and a widow seeks an incarnation of her husband which she never knew in life when she meets his former gay lover in "Allesverloren". In "A Frivolous Woman", an old woman compromises not just her own, but others' safety escaping from war-time Germany, while the title story illuminates a new discrimination, where people seek to claim - not hide - a trace of 'the tar brush'. With consummate artistry, Nadine Gordimer illustrates the show-downs, standoffs and highlights of human intimacy while penetrating the nuances of immigration, national identity and race. This rich, multi-faceted story collection will be a reminder to her countless admirers, and a taster for the uninitiated, of her enduring, yet ever fresh, imaginative power.