Gordimer Knot
A year and a half ago, Ronald Suresh Roberts’ “authorized biography” of Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer lost its American and British publishers when Gordimer withdrew her support. At the time, I described Roberts’ behavior as resembling that of “a petulant crybaby looking for attention,” and, well, now that the book’s out (from a small South African press), he’s still pretty desperate for attention, but he seems to have dialed things down a notch.
The Sunday Independent reports that Gordimer’s protesting the book jacket, said to depict a billboard declaring “Gordimer Bans Books” and an excerpt from her letter praising an earlier draft of the book. (As Michael Cader points out in Publishers Marketplace, that’s not what the publisher’s website has, but whatever.) Roberts reacts by running around screaming censorship and vowing to fight the good fight: “Having failed to bully my black-empowerment publisher into submission with successive ill-founded lawyers’ letters in the run-up to publication, Gordimer now appears to be attacking that same publisher for refusing to bend to her will, as several other publishers cravenly did.” I’m not entirely sure what the relevance of referring to STE as a “black-empowerment publisher” is, but Roberts must believe it does him some rhetorical good with South African readers, as he never deviates from the form.
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