Stendhal's children

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2002 by Filbin, Thomas

STENDHAL, ACCORDING TO THE GENERAL CRITICAL OPINION of him, was good at two things: throwing himself with abandon into life, and then withdrawing and making dispassionate observations on what occurred. Love was a special precinct for him because of its own intensity, but also because he saw it influenced by the social context and even politics of the times. The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, his two greatest works, could never be construed as happening at some universal or nonspecific time. The history of the larger world is always shaping and influencing what his characters feel and do. Some contemporary writers are showing themselves as Stendhal's progeny when they upholster love with all the belief systems, biases, and neuroses of the lovers' place and period, and the end product is marvelous illumination rather than mere narrative.

Nadine Gordimer, who was born in 1923 and won the Nobel Prize in 1991, could be forgiven for lying about in the sun and taking retirement, or as many established writers do, writing comfortable repetitions of early work for their fans, but her latest book resists that and applies the full force and fury of insightful writing to the drama of a young, white South African child of privilege, who meets and falls in love with a man of mixed race.1

Critics who make it their business to ponder pedigree have questioned whether Gordimer is a true South African writer because she is white and of European parentage. Her response has been to write the Africa she knows, which is multiracial, multicultural, and complex. A longtime opponent of apartheid, she chose to stay through the bitter years and I think has great credibility to write on what her country's next chapter will be as it takes difficult steps to racial equality, a concept easier to put into a constitution than into practice. Gordimer manages to craft a story with the energy of a first-time novelist, fueling it with observation and newness, passion and cynicism. Julie Summers, the central character, is the daughter of a prosperous businessman, but she prefers her own place in the city to the exclusive white suburbs. Her hangout is the Club El-Ay, which her bohemian crowd frequents, reveling in a new, socially mixed South Africa. Julie and her friends make a point of this; the only way to kill apartheid is not to continue to live it. When her car breaks down, she takes it to a repair shop a few streets over and meets Abdu, an illegal immigrant from a nameless African desert country trying to make his way in the world. A friendship blossoms quite unexpectedly and becomes a romance.

Julie struggles not only with her father's view of her situation, but also Abdu's. Although university educated in his own country, here he is a grease monkey. Their relationship is filled with external obstacles, and putting it into some definition eludes them. They love each other in the heat of unconscious passion, but eventually they are forced to consider what they will name it. "There follows a space of time that she, and perhaps he, are going to return to in examination-now remembering this aspect of it, then that, for the past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight-all their lives," Gordimer writes.

When Abdu is denied the chance to stay in South Africa, even though they have married, they move to his country and she takes up village life with enthusiasm. He, however, is dissatisfied with his prospects and tries every avenue to emigrate to a Western country. When he gets his visa to enter the United States, Julie surprisingly resists, implying she will stay in Africa until he returns. The difficulties of two individuals become a metaphor for the anguish of the different cultures, and Gordimer is able to deal with emotion unsentimentally and ideology unworshipfully to fashion a wise and moving story.

Binnie Kirshenbaum's fifth work of fiction takes place in modern-day Germany, where the American Hester Rosenfeld has gone to write a biography of Heinrich Falk, a well-known medieval historian.' Falk, a child of the Nazi era born in 1943, invites personal scrutiny by Hester, whose own parents, now deceased, fled Munich in 1939. She falls in love with Heinrich, who is married, handsome, alternately eager then cool, but mainly childlike with many women in his wake. She is flirting with the enemy, for in her mind Germans and Jews still stand as opposites. Her own parents' saga has begun to grow in her mind as a cosmic injustice. She was embarrassed by their accents and European-ness when she was a child, and now she sees how painful their dislocation was to them. Why should they have been expected to assimilate totally into America? This was not how they were raised. They were German only to be told by the Nazis they were not.

Hester taunts Heinrich a bit when they discuss the issue of a Holocaust memorial being proposed for Berlin. Heinrich is ". . . all for it because he says it's right, how could we deny the Jews such a thing ."