Short Stories: Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories By Nadine Gordimer Bloomsbury, 178pp. £14.99That Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, now 84, is still writing is cause, in itself, for celebration. The nay-sayers long ago predicted that the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa would rob Gordimer of her most vibrant and urgent material.
They have been proved wrong, and in this, her 11th short-story collection (she is also the author of 14 novels and numerous books of essays and criticism), she remains as avid a chronicler of her native country as ever.
Her subject matter now is the new dispensation which, as one of her narrators wryly observes, is the "civic term for what used to be called freedom". Here the old battles of black versus white have been replaced by more nuanced divisions of class and identity - both national and personal. In many ways, the preoccupations of the emergent middle-classes in Gordimer's stories mirror those of the so-called new Ireland, with property as one of the telling indices - or disguises - of identity. The German narrator of Mother Tongue, who marries a South African man, remarks: "His white parents' generation were all for steel and glass or fake Californian-Spanish, didn't want to live with wooden verandah rails and coal-burning fireplaces. To their offspring generation, the Frank Lloyd-Wright and Hispano-Californian look-alikes were symbolic of people looking to take on an identity outside the one they weren't sure of."
Here there are stories of Hungarian immigrants, a woman given a late choice between two fathers, a white academic latterly trying to reclaim the black in his own heritage. However, it is the obviously autobiographical in this collection that works best.
In Dreaming of the Dead, Gordimer meets old departed pals, Susan Sontag, Edward Said and Anthony Sampson, in an ante-room to the afterlife - a name-dropper's paradise. This takes the form of a Chinese restaurant in New York, a favourite haunt of Sontag's, who is also imperiously in charge of ordering the food. No duck or chicken, she instructs Said, they are for dull palates.
Our narrator, the dreaming Gordimer, is not all fazed by being the only living guest at a banquet for the dead. Rather, while the political and artistic squabbles continue unabated around her, she is fuelled by a private longing to see at the table the ghost of the unnamed you, whom one suspects is Gordimer's late husband, Reinhold Cassirer. But like Godot, poignantly, he never comes.
Gordimer appears as herself in another story, Gregor, in which she becomes fixated on a cockroach that has somehow managed to insinuate itself behind a glass panel on her electronic typewriter just as she is re-reading Kafka's diaries. A friend with watchmaker's tools takes the typewriter apart only to discover the roach's desiccated remains in the innards of the machine. It's an unfortunate allegory for this entire collection, for so much of it reads like desiccated remains.
Even the most ardent admirer of her work - and I count myself among them - would not cast Gordimer as a stylist but here her writing has become even flatter, the language depleted and the syntax more idiosyncratic than ever. Take this paragraph from History - a story about a tell-all parrot: "The world of others talked back from what The World was set to make of those others - its own image. But it did. And as if it understood, at least the laughter, the abuse. Else how could it have produced the expression of these?"
This strange circumlocution constantly intrudes as if preening in its awkwardness. Some lovely linguistic flourishes remain - the "rainfall sussurus" of the shower a cheating husband takes, the phrase "we must talk" as a "euphemism for crisis" - but they're in an oppressed minority in this oddly bloodless collection, in which the writer herself seems to have lost her desire to surrender fully to the artifice of fiction.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist and short story writer. She is currently the Gerard Manley Hopkins Visiting Professor in British Literature at John Carroll University, Cleveland, Ohio