Donadio’s South African Adventure Continues
Less than a month after a NYT magazine piece on post-apartheid fiction, Rachel Donadio comes up with an article for the NYTBR, posted online well ahead of its December 31 pub date, on the fight between Nadine Gordimer and her biographer, Ronald Suresh Roberts. Nutshell version: First Gordimer agreed to cooperate with Roberts, then she hated what he wrote about her, then his US and UK publishers decided they didn’t want to publish him, so he got published in South Africa, and he almost won a literary prize.
Now, I could try and argue that I’ve beaten her to this story not once, but twice, because I first wrote about the dispute in 2004 and then I noted the book’s publication in 2005. But that would be grossly unfair to her strong reporting on the subject, and not just because she’s moved the ball forward over a year’s worth of developments. In particular, Donadio conducts an interview with Roberts in which he comes across more levelheadedly than I’ve ever seen him in print. If I have any bone to pick with the article, it’s only about the false note in the opening lines (emphasis mine): “Few relationships are as complex as that between a living author and his biographer. In a startling recent example, Nadine Gordimer…”
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