Denise Brahimi’s literary critique of the works of Nadine Gordimer (Nadine Gordimer: La femme, la politique, le roman. 2000) is the most sought after of her books. Brahimi is a French intellectual known particularly for her scholarship on contemporary African women writers. For the first time, this translation gives an Anglophone readership insights into her perspective on the works of the Nobel Prize winner, which reflect the changing nature of South African society and document the struggle during the apartheid regime, the process of political transformation and post-democratic South African society.

Acknowledgements
Preamble
Preface

 

Introduction
Proust’s and Balzac’s Way
Weaving Fiction
Irony, Derision and Paradox

 

1. 1958 – 1998: A Journey through History
As it was in the beginning
A World of Strangers
The Late Bourgeois World

 

2. Forty Years On
None to Accompany Me
The House Gun

 

3. Man – Woman, Black – White: the Co-existence of Opposites
Black and White Activism
The Conservationist
Burger’s Daughter
July’s People
Man and Woman as a Couple
The Conservationist
A Guest of Honour
Selected Short Stories – A Find, Sins of the Third Age,
      You name it
My Son’s Story
A Sport of Nature

 

4. Something Else Out There
Nature and Death
The Conservationist
On Art and Writing
Burger’s Daughter

 

5. Conclusion: Betrayal and Irony
Betrayal: Selected Short Stories – Some Are Born to Sweet Delight, Oral History, A City of the Dead, A City of the
Living, Jump
Self-Irony: A Soldier’s Embrace

 

Bibliography

 

Index   

Students and scholars of English, Comparative Literature or Postcolonial Literature, those interested in Nadine Gordimer and South African History.

Denise Brahimi has been a university academic in France and Algeria, and she has published widely on women writers who share the dual culture of the Maghreb and Europe. Also an author of books on painting and film, Brahimi has cast her net wide both thematically and geographically, researching North Africa, the Near East, France and South Africa.

 

Vanessa Everson (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in French at the School of Languages and Literatures of the University of Cape Town. One of her areas of interest is the theory and practice of translation.

 

Cara Shapiro worked on the Gordimer translation while completing her Master’s degree in French at the University of Cape Town.