Nadine Gordimer's No Time Like the Present, is a novel I'd like to read because, personally I admire Gordimer's politics and the choices she had made during and after the apartheid era in South Africa.
Under the brutal regime of apartheid, Gordimer, a voice of dissent and a keeper of the "white" conscience of the nation, wrote with great subtlety against the illogic of a minority-rule over the majority. She had foreseen a downfall of such a rule, yet she never sensationalized her narratives of anti-apartheid sentiments.
I like her because of the scene of brutalization she had painted in a certain part of the novel July's People. This was a scene where a donkey, the beast of burden was beaten to unconsciousness by its black master under a scorching July sun, in a barren landscape, merely because the donkey wouldn't or couldn't move. The scene had, without naming names, as it were, shown how a rotten political regime can dehumanize everything and everybody, both perpetrator and victim alike.
Finally, Gordimer braved the dismantling of apartheid and stayed on in South Africa despite warnings of a black-backlash against whites who stayed put instead of migrating to Europe. No Time Like Present is about the complexities of a post-apartheid present in South Africa.
The other novel I'd like to read is Joyce Carol Oates' The Accursed.
Why Oates? Primarily because I've never read her, and also because she is one of the few utterly famous American novelists I haven't read, yet had played around with her name, calling her "Oral Coats" and other funny variants in my mind.
The Accursed, a good representation of which is the picture above, promises an interesting read.
In a NYT review, Stephen King says the following of The Accursed:
Joyce Carol Oates has written what may be the world’s first postmodern Gothic novel: E. L. Doctorow’s ‘Ragtime’ set in Dracula’s castle. It’s dense, challenging, problematic, horrifying, funny, prolix and full of crazy people.
Sumptuous fare, I say.
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