Books: Tales of Privacy and Politics

SOMETHING OUT THERE by Nadine Gordimer; Viking; 203 pages; $15.95

In eight novels and eight previous collections of short fiction, South African Author Nadine Gordimer, 60, has emerged as the most influential home-grown critic of her country's repressive racial policies. But that reputation tends to blur some of the finer distinctions of her art. She is not really a polemicist. The portraits of her native land shade softly into irony and indirection; an overriding injustice must be deduced from small, vividly realized details. Her most important contribution to contemporary letters is not a moral message but the brilliant and memorable ways she has found to deliver it.

Nor is Gordimer a one-subject writer. Of the title novella and nine stories that make up Something Out There, four have nothing to do with apartheid or South Africa. Letter from His Father is a jeu d'esprit altogether outside the land of the living. From beyond the grave, Hermann Kafka answers a famous message left by his son Franz: "You wrote me a letter you never sent. It wasn't for me—it was for the whole world to read. (You and your instructions that everything should be burned. Hah!)" The old man is not content simply to refute the younger Kafka's charges. He turns self-defense into the art of attack: "And you sitting there at meals always with a pale, miserable, glum face, not a word to say for yourself, picking at your food...You haven't forgotten that I used to hold up the newspaper so as not to have to see that. You bear a grudge. You've told everybody. But you don't think about what there was in a father's heart. From the beginning. I had to hide it behind a newspaper—anything. For your sake." Readers who know nothing about the Kafkas will still have no trouble catching this story's amusing and poignant drift: rare are the parents who can recognize themselves in their children's eyes.

Three stories brush against the private vagaries of love. In Sins of the Third Age, a couple eagerly plan their retirement to a farm in Italy. Then the husband announces, "I've met somebody." The wife is stunned but ultimately agrees to live out their remaining years together, just as they had always expected. She finds the infidelity hard to bear, but not as shattering as her husband's lethargic confession that he has renounced his lover. In Rags and Bones, a woman buys an old tin chest at a junk shop and discovers within it a cache of more than 300 love letters. She spends a day reading them, vicariously participating in a passion that her own fashionable life holds at bay. In Terminal, a woman with cancer begs her husband not to interfere if she decides to commit suicide. But an agonizing dilemma then arises: How should he love her—by letting her die, or by refusing to abet their separation?