BOOK WATCH : Wise Prize

Nadine Gordimer has won the Nobel Prize, the first woman in 25 years to do so. It was perhaps just a matter of time for the gifted South African novelist, nobelisable, as the French say, for some years now. It is, of course, also a matter of justice: justice for the victims of apartheid, her great subject; and justice for her literary mastery of that subject.

Gordimer is a longtime member of the African National Congress, the multiracial political alternative to white rule that is as old, tragically enough, as South African independence itself. But Gordimer has always been more active than activist. She has called for change in her brutalized native land as only a writer can: by portraying change. What had to happen was, elusively, already happening.

In the introduction to a collection of her stories, she writes: “The change in social attitudes unconsciously reflected in the stories represents both that of the people in my society--that is to say, history--and my apprehension of it; in the writing, I am acting upon my society, and in the manner of my apprehension, all the time, history is acting upon me.”

Times Book Critic Richard Eder has written of that manner of apprehension: “What is most memorable is Gordimer’s ability to suggest the complexities that go with South African change; the mountains, which, as the Haitian proverb says, lie beyond the mountains, the unforeseen routes that lead through them, the dead ends that block the routes.” Not in many years has the Nobel literary committee chosen so wisely.