Why is it that one of the most beautiful country on earth in my opinion, but also one of the most remote, has been producing so many great novelists during the second half of the XX century and at the turn of the XXI?
It is always difficult to oversimplify a series of complex reasons and circumstances, but the genius of Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach and J.M.Coetzee has certainly been fueled by their will to use their artistic powers to depict stories shaped by an historical moment that was just a human dead end.
What makes their works masterpieces though is that they have been able to compose novels that will speak to their fellow human beings long after this historical moment would have vanished.
The historians are starting to do their job regarding the apartheid era and we have to let them work. Only time will let us have a more clinical and "objective" view about this period.
However, the art of Nadine Gordimer - the very first one - André Brink, and the other ones is telling us that this political and social construction was a dead end by design.
This is the power of great literature and great artists to be able to feel their time and to express it long before it can be understood.
One of these days, I will talk about the opera of Morton Feldman "Neither" and about why it is to me such an important milestone in the history of the genre.
Stay tuned !
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