Nadine Gordimer, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories

I keep reminding myself that Nobel Prizes are awarded for past work, not the promise of work to be done.

Nadine Gordimer's latest collection, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, has left me perplexed, disappointed, but I hope not wholly put off her writings.

I first read Gordimer late in my graduate career: on my preliminary exams I explicated one of her short stories for... what? Two hours? Three? And thoroughly enjoyed it. There was depth and nuance that was easily accessible yet not at all superficial.

I should really go back through my files and see if I can find out what that story was.

And then there were her later novels: notably The House Gun and The Pickup, both of which I found to be engaging studies and stories of the "new" South Africa.

But here, in her latest, I struggled early to find anything that I could connect with, a storyline that I could buy into, that felt... that felt like some little piece of home. Instead I stumbled through a memoir of a tapeworm (and a not very engaging one at that -- tapeworm, that is), a memory of a dream of Anthony Sampson, Susan Sontag, and Edward Said. I mean, really...

I haven't read Gordimer widely enough to know reliably whether these are merely exercises she is using to explore new narrative territory for her, or perhaps just struggling to find her way to a topic that moves her -- and while the stories themselves sometimes read a little rough (there were more than a few times I had to reread passages before I could make sense of who or what she was writing of), her style has survived largely intact.

Unlike many collections, this one does strengthen the deeper one pushes into it, as Gordimer begins to imagine and more fully immerse herself, as an artist, in the lives of those who are more distant from her. And while the "Alternative Endings" that close the book are the sort that churn my stomach, each of the three dealing with marital infidelity, they are also among the strongest pieces in the book.

And while I wouldn't want to read an entire collection of such, they were welcome... comfort? No, not comfort; but in looking out and beyond, the dreamworld or the intestinal track, Gordimer connects.