Born to Jewish immigrants in a mining town outside of Johannesburg in 1923, Nadine Gordimer has been a firsthand witness to her country's pendulum of violent extremes, as South Africa has swung from totalitarian nation to emerging democracy. The author was one of apartheid's fiercest and most fearless opponents, from its inception in 1948 until its abolition in 1990, not only through her writing, but through her activism as a member of the African National Congress. To this day, Gordimer is viewed by many as the moral conscience of the nation. Because of her politics, a number of her novels and story collections—which have earned her, most notably, a WH Smith Literary Award (1961), a James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1972), a Booker Prize (1974), the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, fifteen honorary degrees from colleges and universities around the world, and a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France—have been banned in her native land for various lengths of time, among them A World of Strangers (1958), for twelve years; The Late Bourgeois World (1966), for ten years; and one of her best-known novels, Burger's Daughter (1979), for six months.

An autodidact who published her first story at fifteen, Gordimer boasts that her education was fueled by a voracious appetite for the Great Books. The UK-based critic Neal Ascherson has called her a "most un-English" writer, in part because of the profound way in which her early literary sensibility was shaped by Russian novelists, in particular Dostoevsky, whose evocations of totalitarianism in his own time served as an inspiration for her searing portrayals of both white and nonwhite South Africans living in a racially divided police state. She exposed to the world the perils of an illicit, interracial love affair in Occasion for Loving (1963); delved into the psyche of apartheid through the mind of a spiritually empty, wealthy Afrikaner industrialist in The Conservationist (1974); and in July's People (1981), a near-futuristic novel that imagined a post-apartheid South Africa, she reversed stereotypical racial roles, depicting a white liberal family fleeing Johannesburg to seek refuge with their black former servant. At the time Gordimer wrote it, she worried she would never live to see the day apartheid was abolished. For the past fifteen years, she has been charting the chaos and complexities of the nation's transition to a democracy, and her work today is as urgent and nuanced in its tone, themes, and observations as ever.

In her new novel, Get a Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), her fourteenth to date, two marriages on the verge of exploding are thrown into greater peril by a potent mixture of radioactivity and introspection. Thirty-five-year-old ecologist Paul Bannerman has become "radiant" as a result of the radioactive iodine used to treat his thyroid cancer, rendering him literally untouchable for several weeks. His parents, Adrian and Lyndsay, quarantine him to a remote wing of their house—Paul's childhood home—to protect his successful ad executive wife, Berenice, and the couple's three-year-old son, Nicholas. Paul spends his time in the garden of his youth, reflecting on his marriage and his job at a multicultural conservationist firm, where he is battling against the Faustian bargain offered by development plans for the South African bush: The tourism that is expected to result promises to provide jobs for the poor; on the other hand, the accompanying building of dams, toll roads, and nuclear reactors threatens to destroy the wilderness. Berenice's clients happen to be the very multinational companies he is trying to stop. Paul's parents are the other couple in crisis, when emotional remnants of a betrayal from the past resurface in a most surprising manner.

Gordimer and I spoke on the phone about her new novel, and especially about the sacrifices we all make in life, and the situations that cause us to question our existence.
—KERA BOLONIK

Bookforum: "Radiancy" pervades your new novel, Get a Life, both literally and metaphorically. One of the four main characters, an ecologist, becomes a walking Chernobyl, as you put it, when his cancer is treated with radioactive iodine, so he is quite literally radiant. Also, the time he spends recuperating illuminates for him the issues he has with his marriage.

NADINE GORDIMER: Radiation is such a paradox, isn't it? It has such an extraordinary effect on people. Illness itself is a kind of disruption, a totally unforeseen situation in your private life that you wouldn't have thought about before. I think that many of us have in our "normal," satisfactory lives some element we suppress or ignore, and it is often something quite vital. Only when some incredible change like this happens—not only an illness, but something that alters your whole relationship to the world, such as the isolation that Paul suffers—do you begin to face those things that surface, things you probably would have suppressed for the rest of your life. You remember the quote at the beginning of the book?

BF: Yes, from W. H. Auden: "O what authority gives / Existence its surprise?"

NG: So, what makes people question their lives? This is one of the book's subthemes. Sometimes a crisis comes along, causing everything to collapse, and you've got to start putting together your sense of self and your place in the world over again.

BF: Another theme in this novel might have to do with sacrifice. Adrian gave up his dreams of being an archaeologist for Lyndsay, so she could pursue law—and then she carried on a four-year extramarital affair. And Berenice brings in more money than Paul, but her advertising accounts are the very companies he is battling against. That's a rather bleak depiction of domestic life. Would you describe this novel as being cynical?

NG: No, I'm not a cynical person. But I get very concerned about what happens in the world and what happens to other people and other countries, not only my own. This is the opposite of cynicism, which is a distancing of yourself from human fate. But I feel really involved in the world. I'm old, and in my generation if someone had a condition like Paul's, perhaps they just died of it; or if they survived, they had surgery. But there was no question of radiating people, of putting into them a substance that would cure the cancer but at the same time threaten other people by emanating something dangerous, completely without their volition. We have wonderful technological, scientific advancements, but some of them have some extraordinary and threatening consequences.

BF: Among the first things we learn in Get a Life is that Paul and Berenice have a great sex life, which may be why it has taken Paul so long to notice the devastating flaws in his marriage. You write about male sexuality quite authoritatively.

NG: Yes, because by the time you get to my stage, you've met and interacted with so many people. When people bring up this business, I always say, What about James Joyce's Molly Bloom soliloquy? That's the greatest example. He even describes what you feel like when you're about to have your period. How did he know? And it was not just a description—it comes from a feeling somehow inside Joyce. I think if you're going to be a writer, you're going to be very aware of other people, very, very observant, so that you learn when you are young to read not only what people say, but what they leave out—the unsaid—as well as body language. Vivid imagination comes from this intense, unconscious concentration of awareness.

BF: Women, on the other hand, have it pretty rough in this novel. Do you judge your characters as you imagine them?

NG: No, I leave it to my readers to do that. And, indeed, that reader might question him or herself, "Can I judge at all?"—because at one moment a character is the victim and the next moment they are a perpetrator. This is the nature of human character, which is endlessly interesting to the writer. We wouldn't be writers if we didn't confront the mystery of human inconsistency.

BF: As an American reader, I was particularly struck by the frank, casual conversations about race in the novel. Do white South Africans talk so openly with one another about race?

NG: Yes, they do. There is a lot of debate about it.

BF: You've encountered censorship even after apartheid. Your 1981 novel July's People was banned in 2001 by a panel of educational policy-makers in Gauteng province, who cited its "racism."

NG: Yes, but that was a very small thing. During the apartheid regime, I had three or more books banned, whereas now, we don't have any censorship. We are free to write what we like. We are subconsciously shaped and influenced by the things that go on around us—the bad as well as the good things. We can't think that we ignore them.

You say that many Americans don't talk about the problems you have in your country now, but it must affect them psychologically. It goes deep into your consciousness of who you are, where you are, and what the fate of you, your family, your children is going to be. My books always run concurrently with the time of their composition. There's a theme that is probably connected with politics, and certainly with society, with the way that the environment and the nation's laws affect us. What carries the theme forward is the exploration of how all this acts on people and their personal lives. My writings arise out of the tensions over many years between my personal development as a human being in relation to the world, to the people around me, to my relationships and the pressures from outside my consciousness—the way our lives are ruled by the laws, the social mores which impinge upon us. And out of that tension is the ability to imagine other people living like this, to go outside one's own experience. And out of the observation and the instinct to identify—I imagine it is this way with others—come novels and stories.

BF: This is your forte, dramatizing a political story and turning it into a very personal and engaging drama. And you resist the use of a heavy hand in so doing.

NG: I don't think it would be meaningful to write a didactic novel. We get from newspapers the so-called facts, we get the dramatic events. But novelists, poets, and playwrights show how people lived before, what brought them to this dramatic event, and how they are going to deal with their lives after it. If the author is elbowing her way into the story and telling you what she thinks and what she thinks you should be thinking, to me that's a travesty of the ability to create meaningful fiction. I always go back to the wonderful example of Tolstoy's War and Peace: If you want to know what really happened to people in the Napoleonic Wars and Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, you can read the facts in the history books. But to know how it was to live then, we have to read War and Peace. This is a wonderful gift that I have received from the great writers of the world.

BF: What advice do you have for young writers who want to address political issues in their fiction?

NG: My only advice to aspiring writers in general is read, read, read. You have to have the innate talent to go on the search yourself, and it is only from reading that you become critical about your own work and see the possibilities of the word and what you can do with it in order to interpret life and life's mystery. I'm afraid that creative writing courses and classes cannot teach you this. One of the characteristics of a writer is the insatiable appetite for reading. I look now as I'm talking to you at the bookshelves around me and think, There are so many I want to reread. I'm not even going to live long enough to read all of these thousands of books over again, because I'm always reading new ones. And every year I go back to some of the books that I read long ago and reread them. It's fascinating because you have a different understanding of a book at different stages in your life. You read it when you're twenty, and if you read it again when you're thirty-five you've lived more, you've had more experience, and you find things that writers put into their books that at an earlier time you might not have been ready to grasp.

BF: Which books do you turn to?

NG: Recently I've read this wonderful collection of pieces by Carlos Fuentes. I always watch what Don DeLillo, John Updike, and Margaret Atwood are doing, and always go back to Günter Grass, and José Saramago, whom I've only discovered comparatively recently in my life. I think I must reread Eudora Welty's wonderful stories, which meant such a lot to me when I was a young writer. I had such a fellow feeling with her because there she was, a white girl in the South, and here I was in South Africa with many of the same puzzling conditions. I reread Proust, who couldn't have been further from my own background. This is the third time in my life that I'm rereading Remembrance of Things Past. I first read it in English when I was about sixteen, and I think it influenced tremendously my ideas about emotional and sexual life, as well as the whole business of falling in love. So there are books that are seminal in one's life.

BF: Do you have your eye on any young South African writers who have come of age during this transition period?

NG: Well, I'm always reading with great interest anyone who's beginning to write, so I see everything. The very worrisome thing at the moment is we don't have magazines that publish fiction. This is very bad because when you are a beginning writer, you really need to have somewhere to publish your poem or your story so that you can sit back from it, so to speak. You learn from the kinds of comments that follow publication. It seems that such magazines are not regarded as culturally very important. The universities say that they've got other priorities for their money, and indeed they have, but it is not a great outlay of money. I'm thinking back to my own youth, living in South Africa, but where were my first stories published? In the Virginia Quarterly Review, in the Kenyon Review. I've been shocked to learn that the Atlantic Monthly doesn't take fiction anymore. It's a very bad thing for the general development of literature. In my country at the moment, there are new young writers, and some of them not so young, writing plays about the new South Africa with its extraordinary changes. The theater seems to lend itself very well to presenting this society as it comes to terms both with the long history of racial oppression and the current freedom, which of course brings to bear its own psychological problems. But this reality is not reflected too much in novels, and certainly not in stories, because there is nobody and nowhere to publish these stories.

BF: You have written hundreds of short stories. Do you prefer writing short stories over novels?

NG: I love short stories and I've practiced writing them all my life. But no, it isn't my preferred form. It's a totally different thing. To me the short story is like an egg. I mean, an egg is so wonderfully complete. There's a shell, there's the white around it, and then the yolk. So when I begin to think about a story, it tends to be like that, in its totality. I know where I'm beginning. I know where I'm going. And I know exactly how it's going to end. With a novel it's quite different. It's a long journey, so that I know exactly my theme. I know the kind of characters that are going to carry that theme in the narrative. But I'm not sure how we're going to get from point A to point B, with all the different changes, until we come to the end. I would really like to know at the beginning what the end will be, but, as I say, the journey is only partially in view in my mind and I move along with it as I write, so it is a different process.

BF: So it's more an act of discovery?

NG: The whole act of writing for me is discovery. Some people have a notion—not only a notion, they have a belief and a faith that their lives are directed by some higher power. I am an atheist and I believe we only have what we are as moral human beings, and it comes from our sense that we all belong together and that what happens to one happens to all, even if it happens on the other side of the world. This isn't a charitable thing. This is simply a feeling that all we have is our attitude towards one another. If you are an artist, the ability, and indeed the task, is to examine this impulse, and even to encourage it for others to benefit from. It should be questioned, too, in order to keep people contemplating life on all the different levels.

BF: Fifteen years ago, there was a concern that once apartheid was abolished, South African arts and literature would lose its sense of urgency. Obviously that hasn't been the case.

NG: It was such an incredibly ignorant, and, if I may say quite bluntly, stupid concern, because life didn't end with apartheid. It began. We could begin to write without fear of never getting the book published or it getting banned. Write a play and act in it without somebody coming in and closing it down. We even had artists whose works were removed by law from galleries because they were regarded as treasonable. It's immensely interesting to see what happens to the arts when these restrictions are lifted. I'm lucky I've lived so long to have seen it happen.

BF: You have said that you are far too private to write an autobiography. Of your twenty-six works of fiction, is there a novel or a story that offers some biographical glimpses into your life?

NG: My first novel, The Lying Days. Like most first novels, it was indeed close to my life, and in many ways many first novels are revenge against one's parents [laughs]. But since then, my characters, such as the wealthy businessman in The Conservationist—which I think is one of my best books—are people who, in my own life, I would dislike very much. But I've often said, and it probably bears repeating, I think that the two biggest motivations in human life are sex and politics. And they quite often come together in my books.