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Tales of varied hues
The sentimental parrot,
the gay fling and other stories of human experience reveal Gordimer’s
craft, writes Jonathan Gibbs
Beethoven Was
One-Sixteenth Black
by Nadine Gordimer.
Bloomsbury. £14.99.
 Here’s another
possible reason for the supposed decline of the short story: writers
just don't have long enough to get good at them. In her 84th year,
Nadine Gordimer has produced a remarkable 10th collection. They show
none of the "audacity" Richard Ford called for in his recent
anthology of American short stories. Instead, what they show is tact:
a quality that seems bound up in Gordimer’s decades of experience.
There are stories here that a 30-year-old could not have thought to
write, let alone written.
 History
is a 10-page piece about a tame talking parrot, the much-loved mascot
of a restaurant in a small town in southern France. Regulars call out
to him, "... and with the assertion of a dignity of a maitre d’
sometimes he calls back or murmurs in that mysterious throat of his,
Hullo bon jour. Sometimes not." No characters are named,
bar the owner, and nothing happens. It is just a description of the
interaction between bird and humans. There is a swell of sentiment
when, before the restaurant is sold, the parrot starts dredging up
unused phrases from 30 years of listening; a desperate, mocking
valediction for all their lives. It could be a short chapter from a
full-blown novel (Flaubert would have loved it), but as a stand-alone
piece it is thoroughly satisfying.
Other stories read like
compressed novels. A Frivolous Woman is about a German Jew who
escaped the Nazis to America and leaves behind, on her death, a
"stack of fancy dress costumes in a pirate chest". Allesverloren
has a widow looking up her dead husband's one gay fling: "She
would like to talk; nothing personal, she assured, just some dates,
events, places, his architectural activities in a period of her man's
career when she had not known him. Nothing personal."
The settings are not
audacious. The young woman in The Beneficiary contrives a
meeting with a famous actor who may be her biological father. The
final trio of stories, Alternative Endings, follow three
couples through the trials of infidelity. All commonplace subjects,
but unequivocal examples of how life sometimes turns out. There are
less good stories here, and the density of the writing can be a brake
on enjoyment, but it can’t dull Gordimer’s compassion for the
lovers, the children, the displaced and the bereaved.
— By arrangement
with The Independent
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