Quotes of the Day

If the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind, then the horrors of apartheid gave South African writers a focus and an intensity unique in 20th century literature. Not many countries can boast two still-scribbling Nobel prizewinners, J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, as well as a mob of socially conscious contenders like Breyten Breytenbach, André Brink, Zakes Mda and dramatist Athol Fugard. Yet since the fall of the race-based regime and the triumph of democracy more than a decade ago, some South African writers and readers have worried that the thrill is gone, the edge lost, the fire dimmed.

Like apartheid itself, those fears can now be swept into the dustbin of history. As it happens, four of South Africa's leading writers — Brink, Coetzee, Gordimer and Mda — have produced novels this year. Not all are great, but none is dull and together they confirm that the new South Africa is an exciting place to be a writer. The country's literary tradition has long been in white hands, but now black and mixed-race writers are clamoring to be heard. Move over, India (pop. 1 billion). South Africa (pop. 45 million) may well be the developing world's new literary superpower.

Not bad for a country with 11 official languages and an education system still reeling from the inequities of the past — plus stubborn poverty, environmental degradation, corruption and an aids epidemic that has left 1 out of 5 adults hiv positive. But the literacy rate is a respectable 86%, and 5,000 new titles are published each year. Besides, as in India and other poor countries that export fiction, great troubles can make for great novels. Asked if the end of apartheid would take the zip out of South African fiction, Gordimer once responded: "On the contrary. We've got plenty of problems."

Gordimer's Get a Life, published this month in Britain and the U.S., is a good example. It's the story of Paul Bannerman, an ecologist and antinuclear campaigner in his mid-thirties who, ironically, becomes temporarily radioactive after treatment for thyroid cancer. This "lit-up leper" is a menace to his young son and his wife, an advertising executive. So he moves into an empty wing of his parents' home. The situation is ripe for satire, but Gordimer has more serious plans. As Paul struggles to recover, his country and his family fall apart. High-stakes battles over corruption and development rage on without him.

As in A Guest of Honour, The House Gun and most of her 11 other novels, Gordimer weaves together big national issues and small personal crises. Yet this time she also uses local vocabularies, incomplete sentences and elliptical syntax that some readers may find annoying (helpfully, she appends a glossary of indigenous language terms). Get used to it. Among the blessings of apartheid's fall is a new willingness among South African writers to experiment, get funky and abandon worthy subjects altogether.

That seems to be what J.M. Coetzee is attempting in The Slow Man, published in September. Paul Rayment, a successful photographer, is on the cusp of retirement when he loses a leg in a bicycle accident. Depressed in the prison of his apartment, he falls for his immigrant Croatian nurse. The idyll is interrupted by the arrival on his doorstep of the title character from Coetzee's previous novel, Elizabeth Costello. An aging novelist of dwindling talent (a courageous invention for an aging novelist like Coetzee), she is determined to shake Rayment from his lethargy and have him for herself. She takes over his life, threatening his romance and his sanity. Rayment laments that he "never knows, with the Costello woman, when he is being treated seriously and when he is being taken for a ride."

Exactly. The whole exercise seems contrived, and Coetzee has set the story in Australia, where he now lives. Let's hope some Elizabeth Costello takes control of his life and returns him to South Africa to find his inspiration. But lalela — listen. The man has fought the good fight — for literature and humanitarian values — in novels like Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K, as well as in savannahs of trenchant nonfiction. Who would begrudge him a little diversion?

André Brink might. He too championed the anti-apartheid cause, paid his dues, had his works banned. And in his latest, Praying Mantis, which appeared August, South Africa's leading writer in Afrikaans harks back to the 18th and 19th centuries for a conscience-stricken novel about Cupido Cockroach, a character who despite his colorful name is based on a real historical figure. After a hell-raising youth, Cupido converts to Christianity and becomes the first "Hottentot", or Khoi, missionary ordained in the Cape region. The passionate new recruit is sent to proselytize in a remote area — where the church cruelly forgets him, plunging him into near-fatal hardship. As in more than a dozen other novels, including A Dry White Season (the 1989 movie version won Marlon Brando an Oscar nod), Brink rails against righteous colonialism, the father of apartheid. "My God, my God, what have we done in the name of that dominion and for the sake of that subjugation?" he asks. "All those countless dead, now rising up to nod their heads at us and shake their fists at us in silent sorrow and accusation."

No one knows that sorrow better than Zakes Mda, whose 2000 The Heart of Redness, about the assault of modernity on traditional ways, is the most powerful novel by a black writer in recent years. Mda's The Whale Caller, published in August, is a much subtler tale. The Whale Caller (his real name is ignored) has retired from itinerant laboring to Hermanus, a pleasant tourist mecca on the Cape, where he spends his days blowing a kelp horn to attract whales for his own amusement. Then Saluni, the alluring, tempestuous town drunk, moves into his shack, curbs her boozing and tries to civilize his slovenly bachelor ways. But she soon grows jealous of a migrating female that the Whale Caller spends hours serenading. "That stupid fish has castrated you," Saluni howls. It's a mammal, he corrects, ineffectually. This improbable triangle ripens gently until its heart-breaking conclusion. Meanwhile, the new, tourism-obsessed, environmentally threatened South Africa festers in the background. A masterpiece of understatement, The Whale Caller is the real winner among this year's crop of South African fiction.

What about future vintages? Next year will see new novels by Mark Behr, Patricia Schonstein and other young whites who have made their mark since apartheid's fall. Expect more from Damon Galgut and Pamela Jooste, as well as nonwhite stars like Achmat Dangor, E.K.M. Dido, Niq Mhlongo, Mongane Wally Serote, Miriam Tlali, Zoe Wicomb and countless more. Now that all citizens can, in theory, get the education once reserved for whites, a new, thoroughly African generation could rise to replace the white liberal warhorses of the struggle years. (Gordimer turns 82 this month, Fugard is 73, Brink 70, Coetzee 65.) Then the new South Africa will have a fitting accompaniment to its flawed, feisty, adolescent democracy: a literature born in equality and fired with impatience. Phambili — go for it!

• DONALD MORRISON
• A decade after apartheid, South Africa's authors stay sharp