Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories
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Always exploring the boundaries of race, identity, politics, memory, sexuality, and love with fearless insight and deep compassion, Nadine Gordimer has produced another masterpiece of short fiction. From a former anti-apartheid activist's search for his own racial identity by tracing his great-grandfather's part in South Africa's diamond industry to a parrot that scandalizes people with repetitions of their quarrels and clandestine love-talk, this new collection of stories eloquently probes how people are never free from their past nor spared from loss.The Barnes & Noble ReviewNadine Gordimer has never been one to mince her words. As one of the most vocal witnesses to the turbulence of her native South Africa, Gordimer has made a career of finding a place for literature between the broad strokes of politics and the minutiae of human lives. This story collection, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories continues the trajectory of her more recent work, which has seen Gordimer's bold themes of race and history receding into the background of her characters' more personal dramas. The confrontational (and terrible) title notwithstanding, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black is a subtle offering. It is difficult to find in its eclectic milieu any single, unifying current, but if anything, the stories seem to share an awareness of how the past seeps inescapably into the present. The grander tides of South African history that Gordimer has favored in novels like Burger's Daughter are here supplanted by history's more individual incarnation -- that of memory.
