A frivolous woman by Nadine Gordimer

This story is absent of dialog and the climax is difficult to pinpoint. And yet, it is a compelling and beautiful story. It's told from 3^rd person with some omniscience, some fusing of author and son from whose perspective the story is told. It reads like memory, like a memoir in some instances. It feels like stream of conscious thought, and Gordimer's elaborate sentence structure enhances that effect. Her writing reminds me a bit of Virginia Woolf. This passage describing Arnulf's fear about being able to rescue his wayward mother from the Senegalese concentration camp is an example those sentences. They take the reader through the labyrinth of thought and memory by virtue of their structure.

"How could bureaucratic processes—only ones available, badgering the Red Cross, importuning the aghast Swedes who hastily had been made the representatives of people detained in makeshift camps God knows how where by the chaos of war—reach the void, silence; worse, a gust of images tossing up thirst, hunger, parched desert, tropical deluge." (p.36)

What does no dialog do to this story? It makes it move quickly, the reader doesn't pause and sink down into the workings of Grete's life or her interaction with her son very deeply. This serves to preserve not only the son's perspective on his mother, fond and exasperated, but also understand her true feelings about her life. She is a woman who has survived horrible events; Nazi Germany, Concentration Camp in Senegal, the suicide of a husband and yet she continues to hold parties and live exuberantly. The limited viewpoint enhances her own projected persona of frivolity by not showing (what you can only imagine to be) her darkest thoughts.

So where is the climax in this story? We start with cleaning out her stash of fancy dress. She is dead. Is it the point at which she returns to Germany, unbeknownst to her son, and may not escape a second time? Is it where we learn that the son had joined the army and fought the Nazis for four years? It is difficult to understand at what point this story turns. I believe it is here at the end, where the reader's relationship with Grete changes. The closing passages shame any reader who has adopted the son's opinion of his mother as "frivolous" when clearly she has exhibited more courage than any of us might need to in our lifetime.

"Her serious son, himself, had spent four years in the Allied army settling their scores for the Nazis.

A grandmother who'd never grown up.

Life: a stack of fancy dress costumes in a pirate chest. No number tattoed on an arm; no. No last journey in a cattle truck.

Who among the responsible adults, grown up at a distance, had found a lover-cum-husband sitting in his consulting room with a revolver bullet in his brain that finally outlawed the doctor-for-Jews-only. Who had put up an umbrella against the Camp de Concentration de Sebikholane as if to shelter from a passing shower.

So what's significant about that?

The past is a foreign country.

 

No entry." (p.41)

What this story shows me as a writer is that climax in a story doesn't necessarily equate to action. In my writing I feel the need to have "an event" that serves as the turning point. Grete's events have all happened in the past and she is dead. So the climax for the story itself (not her life which was full of them) lies in the shift in the reader not the characters. I think this is an interesting and subtle aspect of storytelling I need to consider more as I read and write.