Gordimer is one of the best living writers, but these short stories completely lack her usually direct and powerful delivery. Some felt oddly like creative writing exercises, and although there was power in a couple of the stories (The Parrot in particular) the book fell flat and feels like one that will be soon forgotten. ( )

les recueils de nouvelles, de grands auteurs, peuvent être incroyablement puissants. ( )

Gordimer published short stories throughout her career, something like twenty collections in all; this was one of the last.

The stories in it range from fairly conventional adultery plots to the first-person narrative of a tapeworm and a whimsical piece about a cockroach that got stuck in her typewriter (she was reading Kafka's diaries at the time, so it inevitably became "Gregor"). There's quite a bit about the New South Africa, although the political messages are characteristically oblique, as in the title story, where a biology professor infused with white guilt sets out to see if he can find any black cousins who might have resulted from his great-grandfather's time in Kimberley during the diamond rush, then realises the absurdity of what he is doing. There are also a couple of rather touching pieces obviously written in reaction to the death of Gordimer's husband in 2005, including "Dreaming of the dead", a dreamed dinner party with the ghosts of Edward Said, Susan Sonntag and Anthony Sampson at which "you" (presumably the narrator's deceased partner) fails to turn up. In "Allesverloren" a widow tries to grasp something of her lost husband that has been closed to her when she goes to see the man who had been his partner for a while before she met him.

Maybe not especially challenging and experimental, but very sharp, clear-thinking writing. ( )

One encounters the full majesty and weight of Nadine Gordimer’s prose in this wide-ranging, inspiring collection. What this artist accomplishes with her plain language and her oblique approach strikes me as uncanny, as a sort of sleight of hand, the whole of which is a great deal more than the sum of its parts. As in the title story, in which a man leaves a European city to investigate, in some aimless way, whether his forbear had taken a black African mistress. The concluding word, freighted with multiple levels of meaning when uttered by the protagonist, causes mirth and merriment among his colleagues. We know how inappropriate this reaction is, but we hardly know how to describe what reaction would make sense.

In Tape Measure our daring author lays out the highly amusing musings of an intestinal parasite, and concludes the story with a very understated glimpse of menace. Dreaming of the Dead is Ms. Gordimer’s highly personal elegy to three admired colleagues: Edward Said, Anthony Sampson, and Susan Sontag. This piece so highly praises the dearly departed that it shows the Nobel-winning author’s skill in a new light. It also provides a quick and highly useful introduction to the three. Again, at an extreme economy of words.

Certain themes recur in this collection, in addition to the usual highly charged political viewpoints. Characters in most of the stories navigate the treacherous waters of love and marriage. The higher the stakes, the more care the characters take. Like the wife in Alternative Endings – The Second Sense, who chooses to spare her cheating husband, the owner of a soon-to-be-bankrupt airline. But the widow who visits the gay man who had a love affair with her husband many years before, hadn’t bargained for so much involvement. However, in Mother Tongue, one of the most haunting and rewarding stories here, a beautiful young German bride moves to South Africa with her new husband. Although her English is more than passable, she doesn’t comprehend all the slang and lingo thrown around at the parties she attends. Even when her husband is embraced by another beautiful woman amid all the banter, she’s justified in her confidence that she knows all that’s necessary. I found the concluding language here quite sensual and alluring.

In some stories, the younger generation engages an older one to search for and sometimes find answers. A grandson wonders at the actions taken by his grandmother, a German Jewish performer who returns to Europe from Africa at exactly the wrong time before World War II. The Frivolous Woman of the title seems to have survived her brush with death, all right, and thought hardly anything was amiss. In The Beneficiary, a pleasing and surprisingly powerful piece, a woman comes to love and appreciate her adoptive father, as the story concludes with the line, “Nothing to do with DNA.”

All the stories here offer rewards for the reader. Ms. Gordimer’s oblique language and unadorned handling of her plots camouflage the vast range of her subject and theme. This is remarkable: varied, engaging, uniformly brilliant. If you haven’t made Ms. Gordimer’s acquaintance yet, this is an excellent place to start.

http://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2015/02/beethoven-was-one-sixteenth-black.htm... ( )

"...they mostly fell asleep in what she called the spoon-and-fork way...The softness of breasts in opposition to the male rib cage and spine are one of the wordless questions and answers between men and women."

These are tiny, dense stories, stylized and yet beyond style. They're quite satisfying when taken one per day, like vitamins.

They often deal with elemental questions: who is my family, really? How does one mourn? How to judge the worth of a life? People thrown together, or drifting apart, all in ten pages.

The three stories that make up "Alternate Endings" take the same story arc -- one spouse cheats on the other -- and in each a crucial role is played by a different sense (sight, hearing, smell) and comes to a different conclusion. ( )