A black and white tale of 1960s apartheid
Friday July 24 2009
Book 14 -- The Late Bourgeois World, by Nadine Gordimer
The Irish Independent Lifetime Reads collection of 20 modern classics continues tomorrow with Book 14 -- The Late Bourgeois World by the great South African writer Nadine Gordimer.
The story is set in the early 1960s in South Africa, a country in which apartheid is still a strange and cherished normality for whites enforced by brutal state repression. But opposition is growing and not all whites can ignore the fact that there is something very wrong with the South African way of life. Like Liz Van Den Sandt.
Liz's ex-husband Max, an ineffectual rebel, has drowned himself. In prison for a failed act of violence against the government, he had betrayed his colleagues.
Now Liz has been asked to perform a service for the black nationalist movement, at considerable danger to herself. Can she take such a risk in the face of Max's example of the uselessness of such actions? Yet ... how can she not?
Colm Tóibín says this is "a perfect novel about the damage South Africa did to its citizens during apartheid ... written with tenderness and a penetrating moral wisdom."
Nadine Gordimer was born in South Africa in 1923 and still lives there. She was joint winner of the Booker Prize in 1974 and has also been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Building your book collection:
The 20 titles in the Lifetime Reads collection of modern classics (see list below) were selected with advice from the writer Colm Tóibín and include many of the best novels published since 1950.
The collection spans the spectrum from stunning literary novels like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children to great popular reads like Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal.
Each Saturday a new book from the collection will be published and will be available to readers at €4.99, a bargain price for a quality hardback. Back copies are available. The books have matching covers and build into an impressive collection.
FONTE: Irish Independent - Dublin,Ireland
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