None to Accompany Me
by Nadine Gordimer
List Price: $13.95
Pages: XXX
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0140250395
Publisher: Penguin USA
None to Accompany Me, Nadine Gordimer's eleventh novel, takes place in a tumultuous South Africa in the final
throws of apartheid, in the year when the old life comes to an end. The
upheaval is reflected in the life of Vera Stark, a white civil rights
lawyer who gradually sheds the trappings of her married life in pursuit
of a small space in existence...to be traversed by herself: herself a
final form of company discovered. Tracing Vera's transition along with
her country's, None to Accompany Me is a lyrical exploration
of radical social change as a possibility of changing oneself.
Both pragmatist and sensualist, wife and mother, lover and political activist, Vera is one of Gordimer's
most complex and intriguing creations. The novel's secondary characters
more than hold their own, though: Vera's handsome husband Bennet, a would-be
sculptor now reduced by the desire to provide for her to selling so-called
prestige luggage; their children Ivan, a London banker, and Annie, a gay
South African doctor; Didymus and his wife Sibongile (Sally), black revolutionaries
returned from exile abroad to find their public roles reversed: Didymus
sidelined and Sibongile on a hit-list of high-profile politicians; their
lovely daughter Mpho, half-Zulu, half-Xhosa, and all-London teenager;
Vera's co-worker Oupa, former prisoner on Robber Island, bursting with
hopes and plans for South Africa; and Zeph Rapulana, one of the new black
men with the skills and personal power to help bring those hopes and dreams
to fruition.
This new South Africa is not romanticized: there are deaths by violence, desperate housing shortages,
hints of corruption, political rivalries. Asked by Newsweek what
readers should learn from None to Accompany Me, Gordimer replied,
"I hope they will take away a sense of the true realities of South
Africa, of the wonderful achievements of freedom in [a] few short months,
and also understand that there are enormous tasks for people to tackle,
and that we need help."
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1. In a 1994 interview Gordimer said, "We are all many people, and each
of our acquaintances or friends or lovers or children knows a different
person. In the end you are left with this refraction of yourself, and
it's for you to find out what you really are." What does Vera learn
about who she is over the course of the story? How does she change in
the eyes of her family members?
2. None to Accompany Me is divided into three sections: Baggage, Transit, and Arrivals.
Why do you think the author chose these titles? How are they particularly
appropriate to the experience of returning from exile?
3. Zeph Rapulana is an ambiguous figure, politically astute, financially savvy, soft-spoken
yet ambitious. As she gets to know him, Vera acknowledges the beginning
of some new capability in her, something in the chemistry of human contact
that she was only now ready for. What does Zeph represent for her? What
she seeks in her new living arrangement is a consequence in which there
were loyalties but no dependencies. Is that realistic?
4. After sleeping with Otto for the first time, Vera lay beside Ben that night with a sense of pride
and freedom rather than betrayal. Her infidelities, though few, are
tremendously significant. What purpose do they serve for her? Nothing
if not a realist, Vera's only indulgence is of her sensual nature. Is
that a contradiction? Has it affected her daughter's sexuality?
5. Vera muses, "It was as if, in the commonplace nature of their continuing contact through
the Foundation, [she and Zeph Rapulana] belonged together as a single
sex, a reconciliation of all each had experienced, he as a man, she as
a woman. Is Vera, "the great lover of men," as Gordimer calls
her in this interview, reaching a new middle ground between the sexes?
If so, what are the implications?
6. Describing the Maqoma's years of complicity in exile, Gordimer writes, "The abstentions from
adultery that trust means to most couples are petty in comparison; this
was the grand compact beyond the capacity of those who live only for themselves."
What effect can political comradeship have on a marriage? How is the relationship
between Sibongile and Didymus affected by the reversal of their public
roles when they return to South Africa? How does their marriage compare
to the changing relationship between Vera and Ben?
7. Referring to the fact that Vera's work has always been more important than Ben's, Annie
asks her mother, "Is there ever a fair division of labour, as you
call it, between couples?" What do you think? How does it bear out
in Ivan's and Annie's liaisons?
8. Sixteen-year-old Mpho combines the style of Vogue with the assertion of Africa.
Yet she speaks neither Xhosa nor Zulu, but a perky London English. How
does her experience of her homeland compare with that of Ivan, who has
migrated in the opposite direction?
9. "Once [Bennet] had been the answer to everything; that was falling in love: the end of
questions," reflects Vera early on. But Ben's experience of life
through his wife becomes intolerable to her. "I cannot live with
someone who can't live without me," she says to their daughter. "When
someone gives you so much power over himself, he makes you a tyrant."
Ben goes away knowing that he does not know how to carry on his life alone.
Do you feel sorry for him? Is Vera justified? Vera slips away from her
family because Bennet needs her, and her children don't. Is that inconsistent?
10. Vera gradually detaches from sex, from family, from all but the demands of her public life. When
Annie asks, "What have you wanted?" her mother answers, "To
find out about my life. The truth. In the end. That's all." Do you
agree with Gordimer that everyone's life is a journey to the self, consciously
or otherwise? Is anyone else in the book making the same journey?
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"A sustaining achievement, proving Gordimer once again a lucid witness to her country's transformation and a formidable interpreter of the inner self."—Chicago Tribune
"This post-Nobel, post-apartheid novel - Gordimer's least political and most emotionally intricate - may well be the finest she has ever produced."—The Washington Post Book World
"None to Accompany Me is a radical and complex novel, rich with the weight of story and the challenge of hard questions. Gordimer demonstrates again that when her imagination transforms experience, the result is a literature for the world."—San Francisco Chronicle
