Writing and Being

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Writing and Being

Book: Hardcover 18 - 08 - 1995

Product ID: 4419434

Condition: New
  • Used Book in Good Condition

Publisher : Brand: Harvard University Press

Language : English

Hardcover : 145 Pages

ISBN-10 : 067496232X

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From Booklist Born and raised in South Africa, Gordimer has written about the place where she lives in astonishing fiction and essay that have won her the Nobel Prize in literature. Yet, as a white dissident under apartheid, she has never felt at home anywhere--until now. Her unifying theme in these Harvard lectures is the writer's search for "a place that knows you." She looks in detail at three novelists outside the Euro-American mainstream--the Israeli Amos Oz, the Nigerian Chinua Achebe, and the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz--as well as at several South African writers, and she shows that their search for identity is not for self-knowledge but for home beyond walls and borders. These writers feel they are both Them and Us. Gordimer's final essay is an intensely moving account of her own journey from alienation in a white cozy enclave to a country where she belongs. She speaks of being born again, not in the religious sense, but in a new world of freedom beyond price or reckoning. Like the lyrical black poet Mongane Wally Serote, she says, "We are . . . wounded, precarious, yet hanging on a sunrise." Hazel Rochman Product Description Whether talking about her own writing, interpreting the works of others, or giving us a window on the world that "we in South Africa are attempting to reconstruct," Nadine Gordimer has much to tell us about the art of fiction and the art of life. In this deeply resonant book Gordimer examines the tension for a writer between life's experiences and narrative creations. She asks first, where do characters come from--to what extent are they drawn from real life? We are touching on this question whenever we insist on the facts behind the fiction, Gordimer suggests, and here she tries to unravel the mysterious process that breathes "real" life into fiction. Exploring the writings of revolutionaries in South Africa, she shows how their struggle is contrastingly expressed in factual accounts and in lyrical poetry. Gordimer next turns to three writers linked by their search for a life that transcends their own time and place: in distinctive and telling ways, Naguib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Oz defy accepted norms of loyalty to the mores and politics of their countries. Their search in Egypt, Nigeria, and Israel for a meaningful definition of home testifies to what it must be: the destination of the human spirit beyond national boundaries. Ending on a personal note, Gordimer reveals her own experience of "writing her way out of" the confines of a dying colonialism. From Publishers Weekly Drawing on lectures delivered at Harvard, Nobel laureate Gordimer, musing on the links between life and literature, offers some fascinating personal reflections as well as thoughts on fellow writers in South Africa and other countries. Her characters, she asserts, are both imagined and taken from life; she discloses, however, that the protagonist of one of her novels (unnamed, but clearly Burger's Daughter) found the book uncannily accurate. The recently published memoirs of several South African revolutionaries not only describe the path to political consciousness, she notes, but also stimulate the conditions for societal reflection. She offers sympathetic, close readings of the works of writers Naguib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe and Amos Oz?"the Arab, the African, the Jew." She concludes her brief book by reflecting on her own road to politics and literature?"I think I have been fortunate in that I was born into the decadence of the colonial period"?and on South Africa's extraordinary recent transition to a country that is now whole. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal In her established role as a social commentator and literary artisan, South African writer Gordimer (winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize for literature) offers six essays analyzing the reciprocal link between a writer's life and the narratives he or she creates. Gordimer interprets the writings of fellow South African revol

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