Jump and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer

Then the trial was over and he got six years. He was sent to the Island. We all knew about the Island. Our leaders had been there so long. But I have never seen the sea except to colour it in blue at school, and I couldn't imagine a piece of earth surrounded by it. I could only think of a cake of dung, dropped by the cattle, floating in a pool of rain-water they'd crossed, the water showing the sky like a looking-glass, blue. I was ashamed only to think that. He had told me how the glass walls showed the pavement trees and the other buildings in the street and the colours of the cars and the clouds as the crane lifted him on a platform higher and higher through the sky to work at the top of a building.

In "Safe Houses," one of the better stories in South African writer Nadine Gordimer's collection Jump, the protagonist is a member of a revolutionary cell who has recently returned to his hometown under an alias. He lives a transient life, sleeping on couches and never staying too long in one place, knowing that if he does he'll be discovered. He begins an affair with a woman he's met on a bus, a wealthy woman whose life in a gated suburb is immured from the dangers of revolutionary activity, as well as the very problems that revolution seeks to fix. She's married; she has her secrets, too. These are the protagonists of Gordimer's fiction, those who have chosen lives of secrecy and alienation in the name of justice. Oddly, their actual convictions never seem of great importance; the decision always lies somewhere in the past, so concrete and unchangeable that the beliefs that made it necessary have become almost beside the point. In the title story, a former military parachutist idles in a spare condo he's been placed by the operatives who have needed his services. It actually wasn't clear to me which side he had worked for--the white regime or its revolutionary opponents--but it almost doesn't seem to matter.

These characters have their Black analogs, too: In "Amnesty," a young woman eagerly awaits her husband's return from Robben Island, the famous South African political prison where Mandela and his associates were imprisoned for decades. When he returns, she barely recognizes him; their young son looks at him and says, "That's not him." For Black Africans, there often is no other choice than to enter into these kind of non-lives: in the affecting "The Ultimate Safari," a group of displace Mozambicans make their way to asylum through the dangerous, lion-filled Kruger Park in South Africa. They starve and shiver, just yards away from the lighted camps of white trekkers. One of Gordimer's great gifts is an ability to write with immense empathy, an empathy perhaps counterintuitively drawn from a political cynicism which wards off condescension and sentimentality.

Such cynicism is on full display in "Some Are Born to Sweet Delight," which is one of the bleakest short stories I think I have ever read. It's about a young white servant girl who falls in love with her family's Middle Eastern lodger. She fights passionately for him to be accepted by her family, and the owners of the estate who employ them, with a fair amount of success. She becomes pregnant by him, but--spoiler alert--when he sends her off on an airplane to meet his family for the first time, the bomb he's placed among her luggage explodes: "Vera was chosen. Vera had taken them a, taken the baby inside her; down, along with her happiness." "Some Are Born to Sweet Delight" is a darker version of Gordimer's novel The Pickup, one which suggests that the immense forces of political depredation really can't be dented by the minor things of life, like love and motherhood.

The "shocking twist" of the story really does shock; it's one of those great final moments that makes the whole story look different, in hindsight. Elsewhere, the trick fails to come off, as with "The Moment Before the Gun Went Off," wherein we learn, in the story's final line, that the Black worker the Boer farmer has accidentally shot and killed was in fact his own son. Overall, I don't think short fiction plays to Gordimer's strengths. Her work is rather chilly and aloof; it's only over the course of many pages of a novel, I think, where one begins to see something like human life behind the veil of words. The best stories here, like "Sweet Delight" and "Safe Houses," share the best qualities of her fiction, but others are uncharacteristically slight, too attached to the idea of a single effect, and lack the knotty richness of her novels.