riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle) (12/13/84)
"The Other Woman" by Colette. (Signet, 1975, paper, $1.25)
Colette was an actress and notorious celebrity of early twentieth-century
Paris; she was also an excellent writer. Some of these stories are
breathtaking in their ability to crisply portray a character or a social
setting in just three or four short pages. Perhaps I shouldn't have been,
but I was pleasantly surprised by the modernity of Colette's view of sexual
politics; no surprise but just as pleasing was her biting wit. My one
complaint is that the book reads in translation like what it is: a
translation.
- - -
"Afoot in a Field of Men (and Other Stories from Dallas East Side)" by Pat
Ellis Taylor. (Slough Press, P.O. Box 1385, Austin, Texas 78767;
1983, paper, $5.95)
Pat Ellis Taylor is an Austin poet and bookseller who spent some time living
and working in the parts of Dallas most of us never see, the slums and
near-slums where lowriders, ghetto blasters, country music, winos, lunatics
and the militant born-again all mingle. This book comes out of that period of
her life. I've read a lot of books by Jack Kerouac and others about the
misadventures of artists set against a backdrop of Bohemian poverty, but this
is not that kind of book. Taylor doesn't romanticize the grind of the working
poor; instead she makes it both very grim and very, very funny. Maybe this has
something to do with her gender -- one of the major themes of the book is her
struggle between her love for her would-be-free-spirit poet husband and her
own nature as an inherently unfree mother. (Did I say that so as to make any
sense?)
A small-press publication, "Afoot in a Field of Men" won the 1983 Austin Book
Award.
- - -
"Friday's Footprints" by Nadine Gordimer. (Viking, 1960.)
"A Soldier's Embrace" by Nadine Gordimer. (No stats handy, but the book was
published not too long ago.)
This woman is the most exciting find I've made recently: after reading these
two books of her stories, I've given her a firm place among my very
favorites.
A white South African, Nadine Gordimer has apparently evolved quite a bit
politically in the 25 years spanned by these stories. In "Friday's
Footprints," black characters mostly fade into the background, and while she
makes it clear enough that she recognizes the injustice of white mastery over
a black majority, when she touches on racial questions she tends to dwell on
the tragedy of "what those [white] men felt, few, guilty, and unloved, in the
black men's continent, belonging not there nor yet anywhere." In "A Soldier's
Embrace," however, she confronts the issue of apartheid head on. Although she
is honest enough, as a white writer, to tell her stories mostly from a white
point of view, she expresses as well as anyone the sick consequences for both
white and black South Africans of the perverse system which separates them.
But early or late, political or not, her stories are exceptional.
--- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")
--- {ihnp4,harvard,seismo,gatech,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle