Novel probes into S. Africa dilemma

Scan page 14

"A Sport of Nature" unfolds as a political newsreel. Gordimer uses real events from the past and present to weave her stories and to draw conclusions. The reader develops less attachment to the main character of the novel, Hillela, than to the events that take place around her.

The author uses Hillela as a device to record the last 40 years of South Africa's history up to the near future-when apartheid is overthrown.

After her mother runs off with a Portuguese lover, Hillela is raised by two aunts: Olga, the apolitical wife of a successful merchant, and Pauline, the personification of middle-class liberalism. Later, in East Africa, Pauline becomes the wife of a Black revolutionary, Whalia, who is assassinated.

Hillela leaves for Eastern Europe, goes to America, then returns—whereupon she is embroiled in South African politics. She then marries another Black revolutionary, who leads in the overthrow of the apartheid regime and becomes president of the new republic.

But Gordimer's novel is far more complex than this brief synopsis might Nadine Gordimer have overthrown the apartheid regime in South Africa, yet the new president still retains a mixed economy. This short-sighted idea, so endemic among the so-called left, is unfortunately presented as sensible in Gordimer's novel.

In the past, Gordimer has been critical of tactics and polemics among the South African left. Her novel "Burger's Daughter" was an indictment of the Communist Party's course of betrayal in the 1940s. But one has to wonder whether her impatience has led Gordimer to look for shortcuts to overcome the tragedy of South African politics.

With the exception of this last criticism, I believe that " A Sport of Nature" proves to be another engrossing slice of life from South Africa by Nadine Gordimer.