Volume 37, Number 17 · November 8, 1990
Love and Death in South Africa
By Gabriele Annan
Age of Iron
by J.M. Coetzee
Random House, 198 pp., $18.95
My Son's Story
by Nadine Gordimer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 277 pp., $19.95
J.M. Coetzee's new novel is more overtly about apartheid than any others he has written, and about the shame of living with it. The word 'shame' throbs through the text like a recurrent pain. The principal character thinks she is dying of it: 'I have cancer from the accumulation of shame I have endured in my life,' she says. 'That is how cancer comes about: from self-loathing the body turns malignant and begins to eat away at itself.' Mrs. Curren is a liberal, a retired teacher of classics at Cape Town University, She lives alone. Her divorced husband is dead. Her only child emigrated to America years ago, vowing never to set foot in South Africa so long as the existing regime remained in power. Mrs. Curren yearns for her daughter and writes to her all the time, an endless letter not to be sent until after her own death. The letter is the book.
Review, 2653 words
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