Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She was born in and lived in South Africa her entire life. She was Jewish (her father from Lithuania; her mother from London), but apparently not religious. She was actively anti-Apartheid, and a member of the African National Congress. During the Apartheid era, some of her books were banned in South Africa. She was a friend of Nelson Mandela, both before and after his long imprisonment. She died, at age 90, in 2014.

I have read, I believe, three of her novels. I find them appealing. Clear and to the point. Not fancy. And dealing with important moral and ethical issues. Yes, Apartheid South Africa was very different from segregated America, but they were not unrelated. In both cases, a White political and financial elite were by and large believers in the superiority of their racial makeup, and had no problem putting limits on what non-Whites and especially Blacks in their countries might be able to do. In America, it was a White majority, and in South Africa a White minority. In both America and South Africa, the settlement of the lands involved power and violence. In America, we tended to kid ourselves and not even understand the depth of our segregation policies; in South Africa, everything was right out there in the open. In America, dissent from our racial strictures was permitted; in South Africa, it tended to be shut down. But the basic understandings were often pretty much the same.

The first of the Gordimer books that I read, some years ago now, is called The Lying Days. It was, I think, her first novel, written when she was about 30. It was the story of a young White girl (a coming of age story) living in a rural town somewhere not far from Johannesburg. She lives in a segregated White society, of course, but as she grows, she begins to meet some other people, not White, and she sees the existence of conditions she hadn’t known about before, she sees the frustration of her non-White friends, and she sees the dangers of coming to their defense. I don’t really remember the story line. I don’t remember if the book had a happy or a sad ending. But I remember the emotions it evoked in me as I read it, for after all, I was someone who also grew up in a totally segregated society and who, until I was about the age of Gordimer’s protagonist, did not even realize it.

The second novel I read is The House Gun, was published in 1998, when Gordimer was in her 70s. The House Gun is a crime novel, set in South Africa, to be sure, but not dealing with Black/White relations in the post-Apartheid era, but set in a society that is still subject to outbreaks of violence, perhaps left over from that earlier time. The main characters in the book are a long married couple, living a relatively placid existence, who learn one evening as they are watching the TV news, that that there has been a murder. When the phone rings a little later, they learn that their son – a promising young architect – has been arrested for the murder and, a little later, they learn he has confessed.

They learn their son is bisexual and that before he developed a relationship with his current girlfriend, he had a male lover. And that it was that former male lover whom his son murdered, when he caught him making love on a couch with his current girlfriend. The parents cannot understand how their son could have done this and, to be clear, neither can their son. There will be some sort of trial, and there is the potential for the death penalty.

Much of the book concerns the trial, and the unraveling of the lives of everyone involved. The reviews were mixed. I remember being engrossed in the story to the very end.

I have just finished reading my third Gordimer novel, None to Accompany Me, published before The House Gun, in 1994. This book does deal with the politics of South Africa. Mandela has been released from prison, and it is transition time in the country. A constitution is being written. Members of “the Movement” are organizing themselves and trying to figure out what the future South Africa should be.

The lead character is a lawyer who gave up the private practice of law some time ago and turned to working for a Foundation looking for justice for the country’s Black citizens – land claims, employment issues…..the usual. She is on her second marriage; her first was short lived, this one much longer. But her husband, an artist whose art was not successful and a man who has never quite found his occupational calling, and she are drifting apart, it appears. She is active; he is passive. And then things happen.

She takes a lover, a sometime lover, a Black man who works also for the Foundation. She works on cases that turn out badly, or at least that become such a confusing web that they will probably never turn out well, she is attacked with a co-worker whom she has been mentoring and he dies of injuries suffered in the attack. Her son (and she does not really know which of her husbands fathered her son) lives in London, is having his own domestic problems and returns to Johannesburg, adding even more complexity to his parents’ relationship.

In the meantime, there is another couple with whom she has been close. A Black couple. The man has been imprisoned on Robben Island, and expects to be a part of the new South Africa, but he is passed over and it is his wife who is selected to be a leader of the new South Africa. Another complication in a very complex country during a very uncertain time.

It is all too much for our lawyer – being pulled in too many directions. Her son goes back to London; her husband decides to go with him. She stays, continues her work at the Foundation, sells the house she has lived in for forty (maybe) years, and moves into a small apartment adjoining the house of Black lover, who has not been her lover for sometime. But she has hopes, perhaps, until she realizes that he has moved on with someone else – someone much, much younger than she.

I don’t think that the three books I have read are among those which are Gordimer’s best known works. I should probably try them. The Guardian listed the five Nadine Gordimer books that you must read. I have read none of them.