Word: true
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Without noticing the program's hint that Machinal is "based on the true story of the first woman to be electrocuted in the state of New York," the production can emerge solely as the external projection of a mind growing progressively more detached from reality. The leap that Machinal fails to translate throughout the play is that this insane mind belongs to the young woman eventually executed, for the play misses a coherent plot and can be misinterpreted as social commentary about the alienation of marriage...
...Gordimer at her best only serve in this context to accentuate the readers disappointment in the rest of the compilation. In 1959: What is Apartheid?, a transcript of a seminar given in Washington DC, we see the Gordimer who we know and admire. Her prose rings pure and true, like good crystal: simple and clear, but heavy with a kind of unexpected weight. This is the Gordimer who spoke because her words demanded to be heard, and these words deserve reprinting because they bear deeply the watermarks of authenticity and tragedy. They are not as eloquent as her fiction...
...Gordimer herself begs pardon, in this collections first essay: nothing I write in such factual pieces will be as true as my fiction. What is appropriately important to her is emotional truth, words that somehow resonate inside the reader. Hemingway used to assure himself that if he could write one true sentence, he was on the right track: it is this kind of truth that is meaningful to the writer of fiction, truth to the spirit. The problem is, this is also the kind of truth that needs to be important to the writer of the kind of nonfiction which...
...that is factually true, but emotionally false: she repeats the necessary mantras about transformation, progress and unity, without any real attempt to get under the skin of the new country...
...What I have learned is that the more honest and specific I am about what I am writing, the more it has universal appeal," he said. "All of us as human beings have some instinct for what is true and what is not, and we respond to what it true. It is universal...