Customer Reviews

Jump and Other Short Stories

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N. Gordimer writes with a very gripping style. I found myself engrosed in many of her stories. Some critical and polemic issues are treated with an approach that will leave a reader with many a deep thought.

African turmoil is reflected in these stories by Nadine Gordimer. The storytelling is crisp and detached. We are lucky to have so acute an observer of the passing scene. Universality is achieved through the careful attention paid to minute particulars. Reports of artistry and fidelity make points in understated fashion.

A man is rewarded with a house for giving information. When the debriefing is over hardly anyone comes to see him. He was an ordinary colonial child. It was his fate to be detained for five weeks in a dirty cell for merely taking a picture. Later he joins the counter-revolutionary forces. Horror comes slowly. Debriefing doesn't describe methods and experience. His parents may have spoiled him when they let him use a parachute.

A little boy dies on the barbed wire near his house playing a character from Sleeping Beauty. In another story the character doesn't know what day it is because the areas for services, churches and schools, have closed. With a mother gone and having undergone other losses, villagers and members of the family are going away from the land, carrying belongings. On the way through Kruger Park the grandfather, old and slow, is lost. The family does not hope to go back to Mozambique when the war is over. The people in the new village, it is fortunate, speak their language.

A twice-married man goes to a resort. The place seems to glisten with women. He flings stones into the sea and finds a ring. After advertising it in a local paper, he ends up marrying the woman who comes to claim it. The moon in the southern hemisphere seems the wrong way around. A couple rents a room to a young man because their son is to be away for eighteen months. The lodger works in a restaurant. Vera, the daughter, tells her parents that Rad, the lodger, wants to make a meal for them. Vera and Rad become involved with each other. She carries a black box for him on an airplane trip and the plane explodes.

A woman leaves a conference with four members of a youth delegation. She feeds them at her house. It seems their education was interrupted by two years detention. Those two years will never be regained, she surmises. Goats live on a shipwreck island and cause erosion. Through exogamous marriage the islanders change. They are moved. Afterwards the island is used as a weather station. A tour of duty on the island lasts a year. The personnel are subject to problems with insects and mice. Then there are cats on the island. The birds and turtles are disturbed. Young men from the university travel there. They are under orders to shoot the cats.

An Afrikaner farmer shoots a black man. He carries the man in his bakkie to the police station and confesses to the shooting. He had ridden with Lucas, the victim, in a vehicle in which there was a loaded weapon. Driving over a pothole, the weapon had discharged. The ending of this story is a surprise. Teresa took a leave of absence from her job and slept away from home, away from her Swedish husband, in order to find out the circumstances of the jailing of her mother, brother and sister. The husband had suspected an affair. Houseguests at a lodge troop out to witness lions eating a zebra. In the night they see the cubs in the body of the zebra. In daylight scarabs are seen devouring the stomach leavings.

A man, for reason of the indemnity process, is supposed to be free. He walks and takes buses. His friends help. The movement wants him to leave the country but he enjoys being home again. He notes a fellow bus passenger as being out of place. She is someone who would treat her servants well, but place her children in segregated schools. He is now living without consequences, being underground. He finds out the woman's husband is away in Japan and that they are drawn to each other as a couple. There is an interval of closeness in the absence of an exchange of personal identifying information. After several more moves the police find him and he is brought to take a seat in an ongoing trial.

Nadine Gordimer's writing in Jump was amazing. As an English Major, I can honestly say that this book was one of the few that actually had me anxious to turn the page. The way that Gordimer leaves the endings wide open for interpretation has the reader questioning the intent of the author as well as the characters.

Jump starts off with a complicated short story and follows up with a series of diverse pieces which make you question our society's values. Although she never outright accuses us of anything, she forces us to consider our cultural practices and beliefs in an attempt to make us sensitive to the world around us.

This is a different kind of book for the average one's out their. But I needed it for my English class. And it arrived on time.