Country Lovers By Nadine Gordimer

Literature is a wonderful journey that takes you into an imaginary experience that will take you away from your everyday life into an entire new world. Literature has a way of providing you with entertainment while educating you of many different facts and situations. It teaches you new perspectives to look at daily situations. You are pulled away from a living, breathing world into one that was created in the mind of the author (Clugston, 2010).From this week reading assignment I found an incredible story that captured my attention and just pulled me away.

In Nadine Gordimer’s story, “Country Lovers” she uses many different methods to describe the meaning behind this story; in this paper I will provide insights on each method. In Nadine Gordimer’s story “Country Lovers”, she tells a story of forbidden love on a South African farm. She starts by telling the story of how the little kids on the farms all play together but when they get older they go their separate ways because of their color.

In this story race is a big issue and it is forbidden for those races to mix so whatever needs to be done to protect that will be done. At first insight the reader connected me to the story by telling of a white boy and black girl whose friendship grew into something so much deeper but they knew they couldn’t survive together. As children growing up we had this white family who lived across the street from us and we would play with them every day after school.

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But even though I did not grow up in the same time-frame as this story, they still went to separate schools from us because they we to private ones. But I can relate to Gordimer in this story because as we also became older, we stopped playing together and moved on with our lives. The different environments and level of educations separated us due to the facts that we did not attend the same school. But in the story “Country Lovers”, they still found the time on holidays to go see each other and give gifts to remember them by.For example, the first Christmas holidays after he had gone to boarding-school he brought home for Thebedi a painted box he had made in his wood-work class. And she gave him, before he went back to school, a bracelet she had made of thin brass wire and the grey-and-white beans of the castor-oil crop his father cultivated (Clugston, 2010). The two then grows older and their relationship becomes a lot stronger and they start having sexual relationships.To be honest, I love the way the author changed the ending because I thought they would stick together and change everyone’s mind after the baby was born, but it only made matters worse and after that day they never had anything else to do with one another. She thought she heard small grunts from the hut, the kind of infant grunt that indicates a full stomach, a deep sleep. After a time, long or short she did not know, he came out and walked away with plodding stride (his father’s gait) out of sight, towards his father’s house (Clugston, 2010).This part of the story made me very sad because it had to come to this instead of them being a happy family and share the love with their child that they had for one another. Similarly, the influence of history in a literary work becomes important when a writer deliberately adopts a historical period as a context, creates characters that reflect its values, and explores trends that occur in it (Clugston, 2010). And Nadine Gardimer did just that in the story “Country Lover”.She was born in South Africa and lived there during the times she wrote about in this story, so this reflects that she had personal experience with this situation. Her strong opposition to apartheid, the socioeconomic system that oppressed the majority black population in South Africa (1949–1994), is a dominant theme in her writing, with her later works reflecting challenges accompanying the changing attitudes in the country toward racial relationships (Clugston, 2010). References Clungston, R. W. (2010). Journey into Literature. San Diego, California: Bridgepoint Education, Inc. ntry