July's People by Nadine Gordimer (English) Paperback Book

Description: July's People by Nadine Gordimer When South Africa is riven by war and the Smales, a white couple, take refuge in the village of their former servant July, their relationships are completely transformed. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description For years, it had been what is called a "deteriorating situation." Now all over South Africa the cities are battlegrounds. The members of the Smales family - liberal whites - are rescued from the terror by their servant, July, who leads them to refuge in his village. What happens to the Smaleses and to July - the shifts in character and relationships - gives us an unforgettable look into the terrifying, tacit understandings and misunderstandings between blacks and whites. Author Biography Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and a number of other major literary prizes, is the author of nine collections of stories and eleven novels, most recently "None to Accompany Me". She lives in South Africa. Review "So flawlessly written that every one of its events seems chillingly, ominously possible."--Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review "Gordimer knows this complex emotional and political territory all too well and writes about it superbly."--Newsweek "Gordimers art has achieved and sustained a rare beauty. Her prose has a density and sparsity that one finds in the greatest writers."--The New Leader "Nadine Gordimer writes more knowingly about South Africa than anyone else."--The New York Times Promotional Author won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991 Kirkus US Review As in the title story of A Soldiers Embrace (1980), Gordimer takes the South African dilemma that one step further here: its the very near future, the black revolution has come at last - and what happens then to good white liberal Johannes-burgers like Barn and Maureen Smales? "There was nothing else to do but the impossible, now they had stayed too long." So architect Barn, wife Maureen, and their three small children must flee, must hide from the burning and killing in the streets and at the airports: in their "bakkie" (a small truck, a sporting vehicle), they escape deep into the country - to the mud-hut home village of their "saviour," their longtime house servant July. And, with a Dostoevskyan instinct for nosing up intolerable situations, Gordimer teases out the tensions and nuances of the Smales life as fugitive-guests - "Julys people" - now completely dependent on a black mans generosity. Theres the expected irony of soft middle-class folk forced to live a bottom-line existence: one hard bed shared by the family (much sleeping on car-seats); the children learning to use stones instead of toilet paper; the heightened awareness of smells and exposed bodies ("He would never have believed that pale hot neck under long hair when she was young could become her fathers neck that he remembered in a Sunday morning bowling shirt"). But even more finely dramatic is the interplay between former masters and former servant - as roles reverse, new awarenesses emerge, and comforting premises become untenable. Maureen discovers that July - the most scrupulously well-treated of servants - has stolen useless little gadgets over the years. Barn writhes with stifled anger when July quite reasonably retains possession of the keys to the bakkie. The couple learns what its like to be dependent on someone else - no matter how kindly that someone may be - for the basics of life. Maureen has a series of oblique confrontations with July - over seemingly petty matters - that culminate in the baring of his anger and the rising of her fear: "How was she to have known, until she came here, that the special consideration she had shown for his dignity as a man, while he was by definition a servant, would become his humiliation itself. . . ." And with the politics, too, Gordimer catches the light from unexpected, convincing angles: the fearful white visitors are taken to see Julys tribal chief - who, rather than ordering them to leave, asks them to help him repel the revolution ("When those Soweto and Russias, what-you-call-it come, you shoot with us"). True, the ending here seems a bit too abrupt; and the prose, often searingly exact, occasionally becomes artily self-conscious. But never before has Gordimer so perfectly balanced the political and the personal. With the help of a few symbolic-but-wholly-real totems - a set of keys, a gun, a bed - she has taken one of todays largest stories and has swirled it, as in a centrifuge, into one small, grippingly life-sized tale thats almost unbearably dense with feeling and import. (Kirkus Reviews) Review Quote "So flawlessly written that every one of its events seems chillingly, ominously possible."-Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review "Gordimer knows this complex emotional and political territory all too well and writes about it superbly."- Newsweek "Gordimers art has achieved and sustained a rare beauty. Her prose has a density and sparsity that one finds in the greatest writers."- The New Leader "Nadine Gordimer writes more knowingly about South Africa than anyone else."- The New York Times Excerpt from Book You like to have some cup of tea?-- July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind. The knock on the door. Seven oclock. In governors residences, commercial hotel rooms, shift bosses company bungalows, master bedrooms en suite--the tea-tray in black hands smelling of Lifebuoy soap. The knock on the door no door, an aperture in thick mud walls, and the sack that hung over it looped back for air, sometime during the short night. Bam, Im stifling; her voice raising him from the dead, he staggering up from his exhausted sleep. No knock; but July, their servant, their host, bringing two pink glass cups of tea and a small tin of condensed milk, jaggedly-opened, specially for them, with a spoon in it. --No milk for me.-- --Or me, thanks.-- The black man looked over to the three sleeping children bedded-down on seats taken from the vehicle. He smiled confirmation: --They all right.-- --Yes, all right.-- As he dipped out under the doorway: --Thank you, July, thank you very much.-- She had slept in round mud huts roofed in thatch like this before. In the Kruger Park, a child of the shift boss and his family on leave, an enamel basin and ewer among their supplies of orange squash and biscuits on the table coming clear as this morning light came. Rondavels adapted by Bams ancestors on his Boer side from the huts of the blacks. They were a rusticism true to the continent; before air-conditioning, everyone praised the natural insulation of thatch against heat. Rondavels had concrete floors, thickly shined with red polish, veined with trails of coarse ants; in Botswana with Bam and his guns and hunters supply of red wine. This one was the prototype from which all the others had come and to which all returned: below her, beneath the iron bed on whose rusty springs they had spread the vehicles tarpaulin, a stamped mud and dung floor, above her, cobwebs stringy with dirt dangling from the rough wattle steeple that supported the frayed grey thatch. Stalks of light poked through. A rim of shady light where the mud walls did not meet the eaves; nests glued there, of a brighter-coloured mud--wasps, or bats. A thick lip of light round the doorway; a bald fowl entered with chicks cheeping, the faintest sound in the world. Its gentleness, ordinariness produced sudden, total disbelief. Maureen and Bam Smales. Bamford Smales, Smales, Caprano & Partners, Architects. Maureen Hetherington from Western Areas Gold Mines. Under 10s Silver Cup for Classical and Mime at the Johannesburg Eisteddfod. She closed her eyes again and the lurching motion of the vehicle swung in her head as the swell of the sea makes the land heave underfoot when the passenger steps ashore after a voyage. She fell asleep as, first sensorily dislocated by the assault of the vehicles motion, then broken in and contained by its a-rhythm, she had slept from time to time in the three days and nights hidden on the floor of the vehicle. People in delirium rise and sink, rise and sink, in and out of lucidity. The swaying, shuddering, thudding, flinging stops, and the furniture of life falls into place. The vehicle was the fever. Chattering metal and raving dance of loose bolts in the smell of the childrens car-sick. She rose from it for gradually longer and longer intervals. At first what fell into place was what was vanished, the past. In the dimness and traced brightness of a tribal hut the equilibrium she regained was that of the room in the shift bosss house on mine property she had had to herself once her elder sister went to boarding-school. Picking them up one by one, she went over the objects of her collection on the bookshelf, the miniature brass coffee-pot and tray, the four bone elephants, one with a broken trunk, the khaki pottery bulldog with the Union Jack painted on his back. A lavender-bag trimmed with velvet forget-me-nots hung from the upright hinge of the adjustable mirror of the dressing-table, cut out against the window whose light was meshed by minute squares of the wire flyscreen, clogged with mine dust and dead gnats. The dented silver stopper of a cut-glass scent bottle was cemented to the glass neck by layers and years of dried Silvo polish. Her school shoes, cleaned by Our Jim (the shift bosss name was Jim, too, and so her mother talked of her husband as My Jim and the house servant as Our Jim), were outside the door. A rabbit with a brown patch like a birthmark over one eye and ear was waiting in his garden hutch to be fed... As if the vehicle had made a journey so far beyond the norm of a present it divided its passengers from that the master bedroom en suite had been lost, jolted out of chronology as the room where her returning consciousness properly belonged: the room that she had left four days ago. The shapes of pigs passed the doorway and there were calls in one of the languages she had never understood. Once, she knew--she always knew--her husband was awake although still breathing stertorously as a drunk. She heard herself speak. --Where is it?-- She was seeing, feeling herself contained by the vehicle. --He said hide it in the bush.-- Another time she heard something between a rustling and a gnawing. --What? Whats that?-- He didnt answer. He had driven most of the time, for three days and three nights. If no longer asleep, stunned by the need of sleep. She slowly began to inhabit the hut around her, empty except for the iron bed, the children asleep on the vehicle seats--the other objects of the place belonged to another category: nothing but a stiff rolled-up cowhide, a hoe on a nail, a small pile of rags and part of a broken Primus stove, left against the wall. The hen and chickens were moving there; but the slight sound she heard did not come from them. There would be mice and rats. Flies wandered the air and found the eyes and mouths of her children, probably still smelling of vomit, dirty, sleeping, safe. The vehicle was a bakkie, a small truck with a three-litre engine, fourteen-inch wheels with heavy-duty ten-ply tyres, and a sturdy standard chassis on which the buyer fits a fibreglass canopy with windows, air-vents and foam-padded benches running along either side, behind the cab. It makes a cheap car-cum-caravan for white families, generally Afrikaners, and their half-brother coloureds who cant afford both. For more affluent white South Africans, it is a second, sporting vehicle for purposes to which a town car is not suited. It was yellow. Bam Smales treated himself to it on his fortieth birthday, to use as a shooting-brake. He went trap-shooting to keep his eye in, out of season, and when winter came spent his weekends in the bush, within a radius of two hundred kilometres of his offices and home in the city, shooting guinea-fowl, red-legged partridge, wild duck and spur-wing geese. Before the children were born, he had taken his wife on hunting trips farther afield--to Botswana, and once, before the Portuguese r Details ISBN0140061401 Author Nadine Gordimer Short Title JULYS PEOPLE Pages 176 Publisher Penguin Books Language English ISBN-10 0140061401 ISBN-13 9780140061406 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY FIC Year 1982 Publication Date 1982-07-31 Imprint Penguin Books Ltd Place of Publication London Country of Publication United Kingdom Alternative 9780786104123 Birth 1923 Residence SA DOI 10.1604/9780140061406 Audience General/Trade We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:6732272;

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