Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories [Hardcover]

Nadine Gordimer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 27, 2007

"You're not responsible for your ancestry, are you . . . But if that's so, why have marched under banned slogans, got yourself beaten up by the police, arrested a couple of times; plastered walls with subversive posters . . . The past is valid only in relation to whether the present recognizes it."

In this collection of new stories Nadine Gordimer crosses the frontiers of politics, memory, sexuality, and love with the fearless insight that is the hallmark of her writing. In the title story a middle-aged academic who had been an anti-apartheid activist embarks on an unadmitted pursuit of the possibilities for his own racial identity in his great-grandfather's fortune-hunting interlude of living rough on diamond diggings in South Africa, his young wife far away in London. "Dreaming of the Dead" conjures up a lunch in a New York Chinese restaurant where Susan Sontag and Edward Said return in surprising new avatars as guests in the dream of a loving friend. The historian in "History" is a parrot who confronts people with the scandalizing voice reproduction of quarrels and clandestine love-talk on which it has eavesdropped."Alternative Endings" considers the way writers make arbitrary choices in how to end stories--and offers three, each relating the same situation, but with a different resolution, arrived at by the three senses: sight, sound, and smell.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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. (Dec.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Acknowledged as one of the finest writers of the 20th century, Nadine Gordimer has received dozens of her culture’s highest honors, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991 and, most recently, France’s Legion of Honor in 2007. Her latest collection departs from her traditional themes of politics and race and explores the individual’s sense of self and relationship to history, as well as the art of story writing itself. While critics praised some stories, such as the title story and "Allesverloren," they criticized others, including "Tape Measure" and a story about a parrot who spills secrets. Reviewers gave Gordimer lukewarm praise for her daring experimentation, but they cited some of her stories as slight. Though uneven, the collection still gives nod to Gordimer’s great literary talent.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (November 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374109826
• ISBN-13: 978-0374109820
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #258,479 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #9 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > African > Central & South African

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed, February 25, 2008

By 

jordan (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories (Hardcover)

I've read several of Gordimer's works (Jump, July's People, The Conservationist, The Pickup) and have always enjoyed her edgy political commentary and her minimalist style. However, I didn't care for this collection of short stories at all--found them slow, uninteresting, and uninspired. The out-of-place grotesque little item on a tapeworm was just plain bizarre.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mixed Bag, December 22, 2007

By 

Nsinga "Nsinga Adams" (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories (Hardcover)

Nadine Gordimer is masterful in using flawed people to tell the story of post-apartheid South Africa. Unfortunately, though, this collection of short stories is uneven, with about half missing the Gordimer standard. Best -- the opening story, "Bethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black", and the closing trilogy, "Alternative Endings". The tape worm story (Tape Worm) was weak, nauseating, and didn't merit inclusion in the collection. Dreaming of the Dead was also weakly constructed.

If you read July's People and hope for a series of small punches that you get, as in Gordimer's novels, you'll be disappointed. At the same time, most of these stories offer pleasant reflection about the human dimension of life in South Africa.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "All Is Lost", February 1, 2008

By 

Jon Linden (Warren, N.J. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories (Hardcover)

Gordimer's new book of short stories is exquisitely written in a magnificently refined stylized format. Her message is sometimes slightly ephemeral, as she writes in snatches of feeling and emotion. Yet, her truly highly developed writing methodology is tantalizingly complex. The stories are varied and interesting in their subject matter. From the life of a tapeworm, to the very autobiographical story about her mental meanderings on an airplane with a problem, she covers a huge variety of life's experiences. She, better than most, understands how life's vicissitudes impose their will upon us, as we work to succeed at our chosen profession and seek success each in our own way.

What is surely interesting is that her message throughout the collection seems to be one of "Allesverloren" from the Afrikaans/German which translates as "All is lost" or as Gordimer herself translates it in the story, "Everything is lost." She seems to be saying that we live our lives and then they come to an end, and in that end, all is really just lost. Life ends and that is that.

While her message seems at times a bit existentially depressing, and interestingly she writes one story about a cockroach that somehow made its way inside the tube of her word processor and appropriately names the story "Gregor" after Kafka's famous piece, "Metamorphosis" her stories are not totally bereft of some hope for the process by which we live them. Yet, she also seems to tell us, that when they come to an end, they end, and thus, in that end, "all is lost." Undoubtedly, this message is a product of her deep dissatisfaction with the state of the nation of South Africa, which was a thriving capitalist society, albeit a government sanctioned apartheid world of discrimination, to the present day denouement that has come to grip the country after the change of control from the White minority, to the Black majority. This condition is expressed very much in her title story, "Beethoven Was One Sixteenth Black." In that story, she conveys that in the old days, all South Africans would try to emphasize the percentage of their blood that was "White," in the present day, all people are now emphasizing the percentage of their blood that is "Black." Her commentary being, `It is the same lie, just the color has changed."

The book is highly recommended for sophisticated adult readers who appreciate fine literary style and vocabulary, combined with deep emotional and psychological messages. As a collection of short stories, it is truly one of the best I have read in a very long time. She certainly put a lot of herself and her efforts into creating this fine piece of literature. It is very certainly worth the read.