Nadine Gordimer - Life Times: Stories, 1952-2007

Table of Contents

Praise for Life Times: Stories

A welcome collection by a master of English proselucid and precisely written.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Highly recommended; these powerful and serious stories span the career to date of a critically acclaimed, prize-winning author.... The themes in these pieces include political activism, race relations, love, family and relationships, remembrances of times past, the notion of home and being transplanted elsewhere, everyday life, and much more.... Gordimers characters and situations are complex and multifaceted, and it is a testament to her literary skill that she can pack so much depth of meaning into each story.

Library Journal

For those new to Gordimer, Life Times is a marvelous introduction to her writing. For those who know her work, it is a worthy reminder of the enduring power of her art.... What ultimately makes Gordimers stories matter is her extraordinary ability to get beneath our skin, forcing us to acknowledge our own uncomfortable fellowship with her humanly flawed characters.

BookPage

[Gordimer] is incredibly gifted at revealing the most subtle character details.... These stories offer a fascinating portrait of contemporary South Africa. What they reveal, above all, is a writer willing to face issues of cruelty, hypocrisy, and despair, and refusing to back down.

The Dallas Morning News

This Nobel Prize winning South African writer is as vital and independent as she has ever been. Boundaries in her fiction and politics exist to be challenged.... In her work, as in her life, [Gordimer] recognizes all the compelling reasons for despair that there are in the world and refuses to be intimidated.

The Telegraph (London)

Daring... Gordimers are stories of the human soulregardless of the color of the skin it comes wrapped in.... [Her] writing is a humane intervention between the two factions of what seemed, at times, a hopelessly divided society. Her characters are messengers who could cross boundaries in the imagination that would have been forbidden in reality.... Thrilling.

The Independent (London)

[Albert] Camuss statement The moment when I am no longer more than a writer, I will cease to write helps to explain the vitality of this extraordinary writer and the moral gaze she has castarch and rigorousover literature and politics in the past sixty years.

The Guardian (London)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nadine Gordimers fourteen novels include The Conservationist , joint winner of the Booker Prize, Burgers Daughter , Julys People , The Pickup , A Sport of Nature , and Get a Life , all available from Penguin. Her nine collections of short stories include Loot , and, most recently, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black , also available from Penguin. She has collected and edited Telling Tales , an anthology published in fourteen languages whose royalties go to HIV/AIDS organizations. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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First published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing 2010
First published in the United States of America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010
Published in Penguin Books 2011

Copyright Nadine Gordimer, 2010

All rights reserved

Individual collections copyright 1953, 1956, 1960, 1965, 1972, 1980, 2007 by Nadine Gordimer.
Copyright 1991, 2003 by Felix Licensing BV.
Uncollected stories copyright 2009 and 2010 by Nadine Gordimer.

ISBN : 978-1-101-55865-2

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Reinhold Cassirer

12March 1908 17 October 2001

1March 1953 17October 2001

The Soft Voice of the Serpent

The Soft Voice of the Serpent

H e was only twenty-six and very healthy and he was soon strong enough to be wheeled out into the garden. Like everyone else, he had great and curious faith in the garden: Well, soon youll be up and able to sit out in the garden, they said, looking at him fervently, with little understanding tilts of the head. Yes, he would be out... in the garden. It was a big garden enclosed in old, dark, sleek, pungent firs, and he could sit deep beneath their tiered fringes, down in the shade, far away. There was the feeling that there, in the garden, he would come to an understanding; that it would come easier there. Perhaps there was something in this of the old Eden idea; the tender human adjusting himself to himself in the soothing impersonal presence of trees and grass and earth, before going out into the stare of the world.

The very first time it was so strange; his wife was wheeling him along the gravel path in the sun and the shade, and he felt exactly as he did when he was a little boy and he used to bend and hang, looking at the world upside down, through his ankles. Everything was vast and open, the sky, the wind blowing along through the swaying, trembling greens, the flowers shaking in vehement denial. Movement...

A first slight wind lifted again in the slack, furled sail of himself; he felt it belly gently, so gently he could just feel it, lifting inside him.

So she wheeled him along, pushing hard and not particularly well with her thin pretty arms but he would not for anything complain of the way she did it or suggest that the nurse might do better, for he knew that would hurt her and when they came to a spot that he liked, she put the brake on the chair and settled him there for the morning. That was the first time and now he sat there every day. He read a lot, but his attention was arrested sometimes, quite suddenly and compellingly, by the sunken place under the rug where his leg used to be. There was his one leg, and next to it, the rug flapped loose. Then looking, he felt his leg not there; he felt it go, slowly, from the toe to the thigh. He felt that he had no leg. After a few minutes he went back to his book. He never let the realisation quite reach him; he let himself realise it physically, but he never quite let it get at him . He felt it pressing up, coming, coming, dark, crushing, ready to burst but he always turned away, just in time, back to his book. That was his system; that was the way he was going to do it. He would let it come near, irresistibly near, again and again, ready to catch him alone in the garden. And again and again he would turn it back, just in time. Slowly it would become a habit, with the reassuring strength of a habit. It would become such a habit never to get to the point of realising it, that he would never realise it . And one day he would find that he had achieved what he wanted: he would feel as if he had always been like that .