Volume 41, Number 20 · December 1, 1994
Free of the Bad Old World
By Michael Wood
None to Accompany Me
by Nadine Gordimer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 324 pp., $22.00
Rereading Nadine Gordimer
by Kathrin Wagner
Indiana University Press, 294 pp., $29.95
Prisons have opened, exiles have returned, the notion of apartheid is in ruins. Blacks have moved into white suburbs, a new constitution is being drafted, the old opposition is practicing for new habits of rule. But there are hit lists, muggings, murders; violent rearguard actions; there is a housing shortage, there are land disputes, squatters risking their lives to reverse old patterns of settlement. There are unheeded warnings that corruption doesn't vanish easily, and isn't a respecter of race or class or political and tribal boundaries. This is the last year of the old South Africa, or as Nadine Gordimer puts it in her new novel, 'this is the year when the old life comes to an end.' The year, as she says later in the same book, 'of the last white parliament that would ever sit,' but also of the rise of the swastika 'from bunker to blazon.'
Review, 2444 words
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