SOURCE: "Her Region Is Ours," in The New York Times Book Review, August 24, 1980, pp. 7, 18.

[Mojtabai is an American novelist and critic. In the following review, she overviews the themes and plots of A Soldier's Embrace.]

We paid attention when Nadine Gordimer's most recent novel, Burger's Daughter, was banned in her native South Africa. At once, this distinguished author of seven novels and eight volumes of short stories, whose work has sometimes been patronized as cool, quiet, regional, had a wide and receptive audience. Now that the ban and the attendant publicity have been lifted and Miss Gordimer resumes her work of scrupulously sifting the life around her, of discriminating, clarifying, connecting, I wonder—will we continue to listen?

I truly wonder, when so much of our current American entertainment (fiction included) seems a surfeit of unreality, given over to sensationalism or flights of escape—to commerce with dragons and trolls, or wallowing rapturously in blood. Of course, fantasy has its place, but how repetitive and thin dreams are! John Gardner's phrase "joyful terror" speaks volumes on the quality of our engagement with others, of our mounting estrangement from the world.

Miss Gordimer, in contrast, living in the thick of real trouble, is subdued, sober, very sober, indeed. She scarcely raises her voice, yet her voice reverberates over a full range of emotion. Her precision is very fine, her discriminations are reflective and subtle, her mind marvelously awake. She remains stubbornly in place, linked to the earth and to recognizable inhabitants and institutions of the earth. She is not a regionalist—or, if she is, her region includes ours, wherever we may be.

A Soldier's Embrace is her latest collection of stories. Only four out of the twelve have been previously published in the United States. Some are shapely, conventionally well-made tales; others have an air of, sometimes dazzling, improvisation; still others—the most interesting, I think—take long and calculated risks. All are set in Africa, yet their themes are universal: love and change, political transition, family, memory, madness, marriage and infidelity, to name a few.

The first story, "A Soldier's Embrace," strikes me as one of the most memorable tales in the collection. It is risky in method, shuttling rapidly back and forth without transition, and the initial response of the reader may be blurred. We begin at a moment of celebration and return to the sensations of that moment as a counterpoint to the chronicle of subsequent disenchantment. The occasion is that of a cease-fire between the colonial army and the freedom fighters of an unnamed African country. The wife of a white liberal lawyer is in the crowd, caught up in the contagion, experiencing a moment of ecstatic shock, an unprecedented, overpowering sensation of human solidarity.

They were grinning and laughing amazement. That it could be: there they were, bumping into each other's bodies in joy. . . . one side a white cheek, the other a black. The white one she kissed on the left cheek, the black one on the right cheek, as if these were two sides of one face. That vision, version, was like a poster; the sort of thing that was soon peeling off dirty shopfronts and bus shelters while the months of wrangling talks preliminary to the take-over by the black government went by.

The colonial soldier will soon return to his meager future:

The fingernails she sometimes still saw clearly were bitten down. . . . Such hands had never been allowed to take possession. . . . He had not been killed, and now that [the] day of the cease-fire was over he would be delivered back across the sea to the docks, the stony farm, the scullery of the grand hotel.

And thus begins the inevitable falling-off, from the euphoria of pure possibility to the narrowing compromises and innumerable small corruptions of day-after-day. Guerrilla movement becomes Party, becomes Interim Council, will become Government, and there will be less and less work for the white liberal lawyer.

The tale that follows is not, in my reading of it, what the cover flap says it is—the story of a man unable to live with the fruition of his hopes. The facts are dispiriting:

Shops were being looted by the unemployed and loafers (there had always been a lot of unemployed hanging around for the pickings of the town) who felt the new regime should entitle them to take what they dared not before. Radio and television shops were the most favoured objective for gangs who adopted the freedom fighters' slogans.

The lawyer's servant dreams of freedom as a rich merchant:

. . . this was the only sort of freedom he understood, after so many years as a servant. But she also knew, and the lawyer . . . knew, that the shortages of the goods [he] could sell from his cart, the sugar and soap and matches and pomade and sunglasses, would soon put him out of business.

The lawyer's black friends are increasingly inattentive. His great friend, Chipande, now confidential secretary to the future president, comes home from exile; he installs himself in the former colonial secretariat and fails to call. Eventually, he comes to the house but will not stay for supper, will not discuss what apparently can only be discussed by black men among themselves.

It is true that Chipande protests and even weeps "for a moment" when the lawyer and his wife finally decide to leave the country. And the lawyer gives this moment pause before dismissing it. Chipande's emotional outburst is doubtless genuine, and the lawyer's dismissal of it is not quite fair or accurate but, rather, one of those revisions of perception that signal and assist in the containment of hurt feelings. Still, it seems to me that the story is not best read as a catalogue of revised perceptions in the light of the lawyer's personal disappointment or unbending perfectionism. The incidents recounted speak for themselves; they are larger than the personal; they have a dismal plausibility down to the last detail: "She was deputed to engage the movers. . . . She had no choice but to grease a palm, although it went against her principles. . . . " A sad descent into the muddle of actual life in the actual world.

In the story "Oral History," a chief's betrayal of his own village is rendered from a series of distant perspectives, some of which seem so remote as to be aerial reconnaissance views. This narrative detachment makes the tale all the more horrifying. The drama unfolding seems to belong to everyone, to no one, to the terrain itself.

We begin with a view of the chief's house:

There's always been one house like a white man's house in the village of Diiole. Built of brick with a roof that bounced signals from the sun. . . . It was the chief's house. Some chiefs have a car as well but this was not an important chief. . . .

We are never intimate with the chief, never privy to his anguish, or to the thoughts that precipitate his moment of betrayal. Instead, we are given to see the normal compromised condition of his village: The chief exists on a government stipend; the Scottish missionaries have come and gone, leaving

pretty pictures of white lambs and pink children at the knees of the golden-haired Christ. . . . The children were baptized with names chosen by portent in consultation between the mother and an old man who read immutable fate in the fall of small bones cast like dice from a horn cup.

Added to this is the fact that the village is close to a border and used as a shelter by those fighting against the army of the colonial government.

The chief seems simply a figure lost in the landscape, and when Miss Gordimer speaks of the "brittle fragmentation of the dead leaves" on the path to Dilolo, one thinks immediately of the fragmentation of the chief in his many scattered roles. We see him quarreling with one of the village headmen, who was a member of the same circumcision group in his boyhood; then we see "the middle-aged man on whom the villagers depended"; then in the presence of his youngest wife, with whom he is at one moment "a passionately shuddering lover," and at the next "one of the important old with whom she did not count"; then with his mother, where he becomes "a son—the ageless category"; and finally with the white men at the army post, where he "had to wait like a beggar rather than a chief."

Given all these circumstances, a crisis of integrity really needs no further explication, and the moment of decision can be presented quite thoroughly in a seemingly offhand manner:

Towards midnight—his watch had its own glowing galaxy—he left his chair and did not come back from the shadows where the men went to urinate. . . .

"Town and Country Lovers"—the name given to two love stories of white men and native black women—provides a solid middle for the book, a ballast. They are rather symmetrical: Each begins in innocence (of a sort) and ends in complicity with the system and a widening of the rift between the races. These two central stories are powerful in their simplicity, in their bold oppositions of light and shade, in the fierce moral indignation at their core, contained by the cool, iron restraint of the narration. Their impact is immediate and clear. Other stories are slower to make themselves felt, but take hold all the more profoundly when they do. I am thinking in particular of the rich complexity, the fine shading, the lingering, troubling precariousness of the story "A Soldier's Embrace," where we are given, unforgettably, a glimpse of a social order only just born—and already compromised by all that has gone before.

But there seems little point in the listing of preferences. The stories in this collection are varied in theme and method, and disparate perhaps in appeal. Yet all bear the signature of the author, Nadine Gordimer; all reveal a passionate intelligence at work.