Loss is the most deeply entrenched theme that winds itself through Nadine Gordimer's most recent collection of short stories. The departures that occur in this collection are caused by death, circumstance, and the frequent, strange twists of life. "Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories" is representative of the South African author's firm grasp on the pulse of the post-Apartheid nation and the strains on identity and love that have come into currency due to the shrunken scale of the modern world.
The collection opens with a white gentleman trying to find a trace of roots in the black culture of South Africa. The story ironically illuminates the shift in perspective regarding desirable identity, the sudden urge to be linked to the original people of the country in which whites have staked a claim.
In other stories, the author has an imaginative encounter with Susan Sontag in heaven and a brush with Kafka's beetle, but it is toward the middle of the collection that Gordimer's prize-winning voice begins to pop off the page.
Gordimer's stories are international in their location and subject. Her interest in the various crossovers between cultures is a frequent theme in her work. Here it is found in the acquisition of new languages, sometimes learned for love and sometimes for survival. Foreign lands are infiltrated through the ability to use the language, even when it was one not founded in words.
She creates relationships that are incredibly taut. Suspense is a vague undertone, if not an entirely absent one, and Gordimer does not rely on the dramatic to propel her stories.
But the author makes it evident that every action has weight. This is impressed most clearly in her stories about the five senses.
In "Third Sense," nothing is thought of the dog's persistent sniffing of the errant husband, but this small change of routine is the harbinger of his infidelity. His subsequent actions (a shower, a back turned in bed) are an understandable sequence when the wife nestles in his back and picks up the foreign scent.
Though there is heartbreak in this collection, there are no showdowns. A certain amount of betrayal crops up in these astute documentations but the reality of its occurrence is dealt with quietly, tolerated and accepted.
It is evident that Gordimer does not read these reactions as the result of cowardice; she illuminates the truth about the nature of what we learn to bear. The wife who stays and the man who plays father to another man's child are neither heroic nor pitiable.
These stories are the stories of people you know: accounts of people who do things that seem unfathomable or masochistic, when the truth of it is that what they do is human. Love has something to do with it, certainly, and yet it is evident that a much more complex conglomeration of emotions is behind the endurance: loyalty, fear, resignation, patience.
There is much that comes full circle in this collection. Death is not far off for many of Gordimer's characters; it hovers but does not antagonize. For all the disillusionment there is no one who emanates disdain or disgust for life as we know it.
Gordimer is an insightful and sensitive, but not quite tender, observer. She uses her pages for the stories of others and illuminates her findings without the prying, accusatory glare of judgment.