No Time Like the Present

February 27, 2012
Nobel laureate Gordimer’s latest novel (after the story collection Life Times), set in contemporary South Africa, revolves around Steve, who’s Jewish, and Jabulile (Jabu), who’s black. Both were “comrades” in the fight for racial equality (Steve used his industrial chemistry degree to make explosives “to blow up the regime”; Jabu spent three months in a Johannesburg prison for her work with the “Freedom Fighters from South Africa.”) Married and starting a family in a middle-class suburb, they’ve “bought ourselves a house while others including comrades... are still under tin and cardboard.” With the “Struggle” seemingly behind them, all that remains is to repair their broken country, Steve as a college professor concerned with the continued lack of educational equality, Jabu as a lawyer working for justice. But as their children grow up, civil and political unrest keeps pace, forcing them to re-evaluate their position in this new South Africa. Gordimer’s novel is teeming with fascinating descriptions of the postapartheid zeitgeist, but rushed along by a breathless narrative that makes any examination of the relationships between characters difficult, and ultimately keeps them from becoming anything more than political avatars. Agent: Tim Seldes, Russell & Volkening.

Starred review from March 15, 2012
A biracial couple faces both personal and political issues in South Africa after the Struggle. In many ways Steve and Jabulile seem to have bridged the difficult gap from pre- to post-Apartheid life. They move to a suburb, have two children--a girl, Sindi, and a boy, Gary Elias--and seem to be living the new dream. Steve, a chemical engineer, finds a teaching position at a local university, and Jabu moves from her position as a teacher at a Catholic school to the study of law. Her native language is isiZulu, and Steve decides he wants to learn the language when Sindi is young so he can be drawn even closer to his daughter. But ripples begin to develop in their seemingly placid life, for politics in the era after Mandela is scarcely Edenic. Jacob Zuma is running for president, and he brings with him the political liability of suspicion of corruption by having enriched himself in questionable arms deals. Women are routinely raped, and Jabu is sometimes called in to help in their defense. (She finds out to her horror that one in four South African men have confessed to rape.) On the personal front, Steve attends a conference in London and has a brief but intense fling, thereby violating what had been an unshakable bond with Jabu. With the growing unrest becoming an almost daily part of their lives, Steve begins to look at the prospect of their emigrating to Australia--though he neglects to tell Jabu that he's even considering this possibility. Against this political and personal turmoil, Jabu has centering conversations with her father, a minister with a long memory of time and history. Gordimer writes movingly and piercingly about the struggles after the Struggle.

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Starred review from March 1, 2012
What is more emblematic of South Africa's liberation from apartheid than a marriage between a white man and a black woman? Following milestone collections of her short stories (Life Times, 2010) and essays (Telling Times, 2010), Nobel laureate Gordimer continues her uniquely intimate study of the evolution of freedom in her homeland in her fifteenth novel, a delving work of acrobatic stream-of-consciousness as the narration is handed off from husband to wife. Steve, an industrial chemist who made bombs during the Struggle, has entered academia. Jabulile, whose wise headmaster father made sure she received a good education, endured prison and torture and is now studying law and advocating for the poor. The parents of a daughter and a son, they live in a diverse, embracing community outside Johannesburg, which belies the country's violently divided past but cannot shield them from the crushing realities of current government corruption, persistent inequality, and monumental poverty. In this intensely reflective novel of conscience, Gordimer dramatizes with acute specificity, wit, and sympathy the mix of guilt and conviction her freedom-fighter characters experience as they admit, The Struggle is not over. Still, isn't it time to simply live their lives and give up the fight? Literary warrior Gordimer writes, There is only one time, all time, for principles you live by. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: New works by Gordimer are always hot, but the subject of this towering novel, the long aftermath of a liberation movement, is exceedingly timely in the wake of the Arab spring.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)