Get a life by Nadine Gordimer

Just finished reading a powerfully beautiful book Get a life by Nadine Gordimer.
Nadine Gordimer was born in South Africa in 1923, and has written 29 books. She was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The writing is spectacular, the depth of human emotions towards illness, death and intimacy are analyzed with a light touch. The story begins with Paul Bannerman being diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Due to the radiation that he has had to undergo, he is isolated in his parent's house for fear of contamination. Gordimer describes him as “Literally Radiant”. He is served his food by Primrose the black housekeeper, who does not take a leave of absence to protect herself from radiation, but stays on and takes care of him and everyone else in the household.

The Telegraph'sDaniel Swift has analyzed the work very well.

Paul "radiates unseen danger to others from a destructive substance that has been directed to counter what was destroying him". Like Cain and Abel or nesting cuckoos, that which we nurture may destroy us; and for Paul's parents, who put themselves at risk, a gesture of intimacy may also be toxic.

We learn later that Lyndsay had an affair for four years while being married to Adrian. Once Paul is able to leave their home and go back to his son Nicholas and wife Berenice-Bennie, his parents decide to take a trip to Mexico. At the end of the trip Adrian decided to stay longer and follow his vocation in Archaeology, he also decided to move in with the Norwegian tour guide who had shown them around.

More analysis by Swift.

This is a densely metaphorical novel. Paul, the lightly radioactive "lit-up leper", is working on an environmental study to prevent the construction of a nuclear reactor, and his return home as an infectious child is echoed, later, when his mother adopts an HIV-positive black baby. The book culminates in a family outing when the Bannermans visit a national park where Black Eagles nest. As Gordimer quietly notes, Black Eagles hatch two eggs, and the larger chick kills the smaller in order to survive. The parallels are obvious - Gordimer's subject here is the fragile interdependence of life - but we never feel the deadening hand of allegory.
In a few moments, this book breaks with its own cautious form and makes a bid for contemporary relevance: "The direst of all threats in the world's collective fear - beyond terrorism, suicide bombings, introduction of deadly viruses, fatal chemical substances in innocent packaging, mad cow disease - is still 'nuclear capability'." To that list of possible demons could today be added avian flu, but the point stands: the nuclear threat is the most haunting of all, and this is precisely because of its ready availability as a metaphor, as well as a mechanism, of destruction. Get a Life is about all of our fears: of destruction, but also of contamination, alienation and enforced solitude.

"Disaster is private, in its way, as love is," Gordimer writes almost in passing, but this line could stand as an epigraph to a brave story about the fragility and the dangers of intimacy.