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    No Time Like the Present: A Novel
    No Time Like the Present: A Novel
    No Time Like the Present: A Novel
    Ebook461 pages10 hours

    No Time Like the Present: A Novel

    By Nadine Gordimer

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    A sharply observed new novel about post-apartheid South Africa from the Nobel Prize winner

    Nadine Gordimer is one of our most telling contemporary writers. With each new work, she attacks—with a clear-eyed fierceness, a lack of sentimentality, and a deep understanding of the darkest depths of the human soul—her eternal themes: the inextricable link between personal and communal history; the inescapable moral ambiguities of daily life; the political and racial tensions that persist in her homeland, South Africa. And in each new work is fresh evidence of her literary genius: in the sharpness of her psychological insights, the stark beauty of her language, the complexity of her characters, and the difficult choices with which they are faced.

    In No Time Like the Present, Gordimer trains her keen eye on Steve and Jabulile, an interracial couple living in a newly, tentatively, free South Africa. They have a daughter, Sindiswa; they move to the suburbs; Steve becomes a lecturer at a university; Jabulile trains to become a lawyer; there is another child, a boy this time. There is nothing so extraordinary about their lives, and yet, in telling their story and the stories of their friends and families, Gordimer manages to capture the tortured, fragmented essence of a nation struggling to define itself post-apartheid.

    The subject is contemporary, but Gordimer's treatment is, as ever, timeless. In No Time Like the Present, she shows herself once again a master novelist, at the height of her prodigious powers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 27, 2012
    ISBN9780374709129
    No Time Like the Present: A Novel
    Author

    Nadine Gordimer

    Nadine Gordimer's many novels include The Conservationist, joint winner of the Booker Prize, Get A Life, Burger's Daughter, July's People, My Son's Story and The Pickup. Her collections of short stories include The Soft Voice of the Serpent, Something Out There, Jump, Loot and, most recently, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. She has also collected and edited Telling Tales, a story anthology published in fourteen languages whose royalties go to HIV/AIDS organisations. In 2010 her nonfiction writings were collected in Telling Times and a substantial selection of her stories was published in Life Times. Her most recent novel was No Time Like the Present, published in 2012. Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She lived in South Africa until she died in 2014.

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    • 5/5
      As True Now as a Decade Ago: Visiting family in Johannesburg we were taken to Constitution Hill and to Liliesleaf and learned just how bad the old apartheid regime was back then. But, in the present, our teacher friend's paycheck was three weeks past due and some of the teachers were on strike, "no pay no work". We were cautioned about to keep the outside metal gates locked and our car windows rolled up. Political discussions centered around corruption and mismanagement in the government. Yet underneath there is also great pride in their country, and Gordimer has managed to communicate this too. I look forward to reading her other novels.
    • 2/5
      A disappointing final novel from a Nobel-winner, which feels overlong and difficult to get through. The book follows an interracial couple in post-apartheid South Africa, but there is no driving narrative to pull you through the pages – just a kind of daily notation of ongoing events: strikes, corruption charges, elections, bourgeoisification, the quotidian frustrations of a newly-free society. It feels a bit like Nadine Gordimer just looked through the headlines every morning and jotted down another couple of pages of the novel – especially near the end, where she seems to be settling in to tackle Zuma's presidency on a gruelling day-by-day basis.The treacly pace is compounded by a prose style of impressionistic flightiness, comma-splicing thoughts together, dropping conjunctions and quotation marks, and generally darting around in a disconcerting way. One hunts in vain for a finite verb, or scratches one's head over statements like this:What the reasons could be, and these were with them in the times of silence which keep the balance of living together in the tenderly joyous interpenetration of love-making, and the need to be a self.Weirdly, the part that stuck out the most had nothing to do with politics – it was when the husband had an affair during a trip to London. Something that in the hands of a lesser author would have been made to recur as a plot point, but which here is beautifully built-up and described, and then never referred to again. It's strangely beautiful.Throughout the book, though, there is a frustrating sense that it can't be comfortably flung aside – there are real insights here buried among the blocks of text, and the general subject of how racial inequality has been sublimated into a class struggle, in South Africa's ‘aftermath of peace’, is always of interest. This book, unfortunately, does not approach it in the most compelling way.

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    No Time Like the Present - Nadine Gordimer

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