Always a precise, formidable thinker, Nadine Gordimer personifies the writer as moral and political consciousness. The 1991 Nobel Laureate for Literature, her anger is more irritable than passionate and her outrage has never deflected her intelligence, while her fiction is often more important as comment than great art. She does not deliver grand statements, she offers truthful, logical observations based on fact - above all, she is an African, powerfully aware that she does not speak any African language, only the tongue of the coloniser.
Gordimer is also a reader, and while she had always championed African literature as one of the world's most diverse and exciting, she also looks beyond it. In addition to her Charles Eliot Norton lecture series, during which she discussed Chinua Achebe, Amos Oz and Naguib Mahouz, there is an excellent critical essay on the Central European writer Joseph Roth and the cultural diversity of his AustrianHungarian Empire. Her pre-Nobel celebration of Gunter Grass is interesting, the stiff correspondence between herself and fellow-laureate Japan's Kenzaburo Oe far less so. There is sufficient autobiographical and opinionated writing gathered here to ensure this is a valuable collection from a writer who has always lived in the present.
