Volume 29, Number 19 · December 2, 1982
In the Garrison
By Jane Kramer
Waiting for the Barbarians
by J.M. Coetzee
Penguin, 156 pp., $3.95 (paper)
A Chain of Voices
by André Brink
Morrow, 525 pp., $15.00
These two South African novels came out in France at about the same time they were published here, and it was instructive (at least for me) to read what the French had to say about them because the French are shameless enthusiasts when they are insecure. The French cannot resist a Great Theme. The same people whose highest praise for work of known quality—a Delacroix aquarelle, say, or the attentions of a gentle and discreet lover—is a shrug and a pas mal, will start blathering sublime, superbe, and éclatant when they confront a book or a film or a piece of theater that offers up some tonic cataclysm for their appreciation. They have a word for writers who chronicle the important inhumanities of their time. Nobelisable, they say. After Solzhenitsyn, every Russian dissident with a novel in his drawer was nobelisable. Today, the writers of South Africa—masterly writers like J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, popular writers like André Brink and Alan Paton—are nobelisable. Apartheid has replaced le Goulag as the revealed outrage of the literary season, and a 'literature of apartheid' is taken for the books of a dozen writers of wildly various sensibility and talent, proving only how much easier it is to tell good from bad than to tell good books from bad ones.
Review, 5186 words
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