Volume 47, Number 1 · January 20, 2000
Endgame
By John Banville
Disgrace
by J.M. Coetzee
Viking, 220 pp., $23.95
Woe betide the novelist who lives in interesting times, or, more woeful still, in an interesting place. After the great flourishing of fiction in the relatively stable, not to say stagnant, nineteenth century, the successive cataclysms of the first half of our own century left most novelists, along with the rest of their fellow men, stranded in confusion and spiritual doubt. One political running sore of the postwar era which would have been expected to challenge, if only to defeat, the fiction writer's imagination was South Africa, though the issues at stake may have seemed, from the point of view of literature, dispiritingly black and white. Nadine Gordimer was, of course, as the award to her of the Nobel Prize acknowledged, the leading literary chronicler of the struggle for justice and equality in South Africa, one phase of which ended with the election of Nelson Mandela as president of a new, multiracial state. Gordimer's oeuvre is a grand and valiant achievement, of interest not least in that, like the work of George Eliot, it pointedly illustrates the problems the artist encounters when she elects to address head-on in her art the political and social questions of the day.
Review, 3497 words
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