Photo by Victor Geere (Creative Commons)
Digging through the (sadly pretty limited) online archives of the excellent Virginia Quarterly Review recently, I came across this interview with South African author (and Nobel Prize winner) Nadine Gordimer.
Here are a few highlights:
“We’ve got to examine truth. To me, writing, from the very beginning and right until this day, is a voyage of discovery. Of the mystery of life. I am one of those people who have no religious faith, I am an atheist. I believe there is only this life. But this life is so incredible.”
“There is more truth in my fiction than in nonfiction. I think, subconsciously, [if] I am writing an article or talking to you, there is a certain amount of self-censorship going on. But in my fiction I am writing as if I were dead. I want to say it all. I want to say everything I know.”
To me, writing, from the very beginning and right until this day, is a voyage of discovery.
“Writers don’t only listen, they also look. Though, indeed, they do listen. I started being an eavesdropper when I was a child, picking up unexplained little bits of conversation and imagining what led to that, what drama in that couple’s life, or what happened between that child and the parent when I overheard: “Stop that! You’re being very naughty.” You know, what does it all mean?”
Read the whole interview here.
I am a bit of a South Africa-phile – if you are too (or think you could become one!), check out my South Africa Reading Guide for some great literature, Gordimer included.
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6 Comments... join the discussion!
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Hi Waldo, Thanks for letting me know! I guess I took a wrong turn on the site somehow – I've always hit subscriber walls before. I'll definitely be back to browse around some more.
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Digging through the (sadly pretty limited) online archives of the excellent Virginia Quarterly Review recently, I came across this interview with South African author (and Nobel Prize winner) Nadine Gordimer.
We’ve got every article we’ve ever published since 1975, and a smattering going clear back to our founding 1925. Of the 4,007 articles that comprise that collection, 2,112 are available in their entirety to non-subscribers, more than half. You’ll find few comparable publications that provide so great a portion of their archives under such terms. That’s really not particularly limited.
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Hi Waldo, Thanks for letting me know! I guess I took a wrong turn on the site somehow – I’ve always hit subscriber walls before. I’ll definitely be back to browse around some more.
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Ah, it's probably just the luck of the draw, Eva. Sometimes you can read for hours without hitting a paywall, and sometimes you'll come after one subscription-required article after another. It all depends on how you pick your way through the site. For a few years we've been gathering permission from authors and their estates to make their work available online but, as you can imagine, it's rather an overwhelming task to track down thousands and thousands of copyright holders. If we could snap our fingers and get permission from every one of them, then by tomorrow we'd have 99% of our archives online for free.
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Ah, it’s probably just the luck of the draw, Eva. Sometimes you can read for hours without hitting a paywall, and sometimes you’ll come after one subscription-required article after another. It all depends on how you pick your way through the site. For a few years we’ve been gathering permission from authors and their estates to make their work available online but, as you can imagine, it’s rather an overwhelming task to track down thousands and thousands of copyright holders. If we could snap our fingers and get permission from every one of them, then by tomorrow we’d have 99% of our archives online for free.
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