Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, and Other Stories

Gordimer's new collection of short stories is elegant, if uneven. The title story, a complex meditation on race and kinship, is followed by a tale narrated by a tapeworm. David Colacci handles them with equal skill and solemnity. Susan Ericksen gives a marvelous taut performance of compressed emotions in "Alternative Endings," in which a bewildered wife comes up with three different resolutions to the puzzle of her husband's departure from normal behavior. Ericksen is equally committed to the plight of the writer in "Gregor," who has a cockroach stuck in her typewriter. Neither narrator is perfect. Colacci sometimes boggles the meaning of a sentence with misplaced emphasis; Erickson can't distinguish between "demur" and "demure," but these are small quibbles about a rich and skillful production. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Starred review from September 10, 2007
Thirteen stories from South African Nobel Prize–winner Gordimer offer a staccato demonstration of how people’s origins, inheritances and histories—and the loss of them—are inescapable. The title story centers on the white, twice-divorced academic descendant of a London diamond prospector who visits his forebear’s mine in Kimberly, South Africa, and wonders about who in the township, black and white, he may be related to. The narrator of “Dreaming of the Dead” is haunted by famous former companions (the late intellectuals Edward Said and Susan Sontag), while the grieving widow of “Allesverloren
” (or “All Is Lost”) seeks out her husband’s former lover to unearth a message from him. The daughter of “A Beneficiary,” meanwhile, finds an unsettling letter among the effects of her late mother, an actress. Cultural inheritance shadows the marriage of a Hungarian couple that emigrates to South Africa in “Alternate Endings: Second Sense,” and also the son of “A Frivolous Woman,” who resents his flamboyant German-Jewish émigré mother’s easy adaptability. Again and again, Gordimer puts big, sweeping disasters (the Holocaust, apartheid) in the pasts of flawed, ill-equipped characters and shows how their choices have been little more than wing beats against history. The results are terrifying, sometimes acidly funny and often beautiful.

April 15, 2008
Read by two different narrators, this collection of 13 stories gives a good sense of the diversity of Nobel prize winner Gordimer's work and its longtime focus on relationships, politics, race, and memory. There's also some less expected humor. The situations vary from a Chinese restaurant meal hosted by the late Susan Sontag, to a French caf with a loquacious parrot and the inner mental gymnastics of people troubled by loss, to the insights of a tapeworm. What may make this audio version of special interest is the differences in the two narrators: David Colacci narrates his selections with a strong and sure sense of the words, while Susan Ericksen seems more attuned to the storytelling voice, though the differences may depend on the stories assigned to them. A recommended choice for libraries whose clientele like audio fiction in its shorter form.Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo, NY

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