Out of Africa

By Eve Auchincloss

A SOLDIER'S EMBRACE by Nadine Gordimer Viking; 144 pages; $8.95

After a cease-fire in some unnamed southern African nation, the wife of a liberal lawyer finds herself in the midst of a crowd. She throws one arm around a young white mercenary, the other around a black soldier, and kisses them. Like the protagonist in the title story of this new collection, Nadine Gordimer has been caught by historical confrontations and gone on to embrace them. For more than 25 years, the native South African has been writing abidingly clear-eyed, humane fiction that comprehends both sides, but never evades the profound issues of racism.

Her Africa is a vast territory of ambiguities and paradoxes. In A Hunting Accident, an educated young black man, who combines a "cajoling African laugh" with a "ruthless Cambridge accent," takes visiting friends on a hunt. He is after protected eland, but settles for a herd of hartebeest. One of the animals, shot messily, dies as the hunters stand over it, giving a last cry, "the familiar and gentle, pitiful moo of any clumsy dairy mother." A photographer shoots the final flicker of its life with a closeup lens; later everyone dines on roast flesh. "Should have been hung first," the African host remarks, "but here, with us, nobody wants to wait."

In one love story, a lonely Austrian geologist befriends a shy colored girl, a checker in the local supermarket. She brings him groceries, sews on buttons, sleeps with him. He improves her English, teaches her to type, buys her a wristwatch. Two solitudes inarticulately touch. The police break in on them one evening; they are examined to see if they have broken the law against carnal intercourse between races. At their trial they are let off for want of hard evidence. Neither will repeat the mistake.

In a related tale, the childhood friendship between a rich farmer's son and a black girl survives into adolescence. They become lovers; she has a baby, floss-haired and hazel-eyed. The young father, ashamed and afraid, kills it, but at his trial he is acquitted--again, for lack of evidence. The boy's father tells the press, "I will try and carry on as best I can to hold up my head in the district." It is still a society more troubled by miscegenation than murder.

When a responsible African attempts to play by white rules, tragic misunderstanding seems inevitable. A chief finds that his village has become a refuge for rebels. He travels to an army post to report these strangers; he wants them arrested to save his people from breaking federal law. But by the time he returns home, the army, acting on his information, has obliterated the village. The chief hangs himself.

In all 13 stories, Gordimer marks details with a keen, sympathetic intelligence --the way "beaded water looked oyster-shell blue" on a wading black girl's legs; a scared Swedish girl taking the hand, "cold and tough as the feel of a tortoise's foot, of the old gun-bearer who had never before been touched by a white woman"; the way a servant's "manner towards white people was based on the personality of the white person she worked for."

The author is above all a psychologist, and many of her stories bypass the racial issue--though that dark ground bass can be felt even when it is not heard. She is sensitive to unconscious communication between people--a man and his about-to-be-discarded mistress, a chief and his mother ("As often when people who share the same blood share the same thought, for a moment mother and son looked exactly alike, he old-womanish, she mannish"). Her metaphors are a form of insight: her mother is recalled as both ruler and prisoner of her children, like the helpless termite queen dug out from under the parlor floorboards. In a tiny story more meditation than narrative, Gordimer finds an enduring metaphor for the society caged by repressive laws -- the zoo lion whose deep panting and anguished groan she hears at night, "as close as if he's out on the free way now, bewildered, finding his way, turning his splendid head at last to claim what he's never seen, the country where he's king."

Editors' Choice

FICTION: Consenting Adults or The Duchess Will Be Furious, Peter De Vries sbJoshua Then and Now, Mordecai RichlersbMusic for Chameleons, Truman Capote Rough Strife, Lynne Sharon Schwartz sbThe Magic Labyrinth, Philip Jose FarmersbThe Second Coming, Walker Percy sbThe Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard

NONFICTION: A.E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet, Richard Perceval Graves - China Men, Maxim Hong Kingston sbHeartsounds, Martha Weinman Lear - Kipling, Auden & Co., Randall Jarrell sbLaughing in the Hills, Bill Barich sbPhilosophy and Public Policy, Sidney Hook War Within and Without, Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Rage of Angels, Sheldon (1 last week)

2. The Spike, De Borchgrave & Moss (4)

3. The Bourne Identity, Ludlum (3)

4. Random Winds, Plain (2)

5. Princess Daisy, Krantz (5)

6. Sins of the Fathers, Howatch (7)

7. The Ninja, Lustbader (6)

8. Murder in the White House, Truman

9. The Wounded Land, Donaldson

10. Green Monday, Thomas

NONFICTION

1. Free to Choose, Milton & Rose Friedman (2)

2. Thy Neighbor's Wife, Talese (1)

3. Nothing Down, Allen (4)

4. How to Get Pregnant, Silber (10)

5. The Real War, Nixon (3)

6. How You Can Become Financially Independent by Investing in Real Estate, Lowry (9)

7. Shelley, Winters (8)

8. Men in Love, Friday (6)

9. Craig Claiborne's Gourmet Diet, Claiborne with Franey (7)

10. Psychology of Romantic Love, Branden

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.