Get a Life: A Novel - Hardcover

Gordimer, Nadine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374161704 ISBN 13: 9780374161705

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

Synopsis

A young man's treatment for cancer inspires profound changes in his family.

Paul Bannerman, an ecologist in South Africa, believes he understands the trajectory of his life, with the usual markers of vocation and marriage. But when he's diagnosed with thyroid cancer and, after surgery, prescribed treatment that will leave him radioactive, for a period a danger to others, he begins to question, as Auden wrote, "what Authority gives / existence its surprise."

In the garden of his childhood home, where his businessman father, Adrian, and prominent civil rights lawyer mother, Lyndsay, take him in to protect his wife and child from radiation, he enters an unthinkable existence and another kind of illumination: the contradiction between the values of his work and those of his wife, Benni, an ad agency executive. His mother is transformed by the strange state of her son's existence to face her own past. Meanwhile, projects to build a nuclear reactor and drain vital wetlands preoccupy Paul as if he were at work. By the time he is cured, both families have been changed. On his return to his home and career, his parents go to Mexico to fulfill the archaeological vocation Adrian sacrificed to support his family. The consequence of this trip is the final surprise in this extraordinary exploration of passionate individual existences.

"This novel begins superbly and ends wonderfully, and in between there are passages of high intelligence, not without Gordimer's signature asperity.” -- Ward Just, The Washington Post Book World

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"More profound, more searching, more accomplished than what she was writing earlier in her long and distinguished career."
—Los Angeles Times

"Nadine Gordimer’s work is endowed with an emotional genius so palpable one experiences it like a finger pressing steadily upon the prose."
—The Village Voice

"A timely novel and a provocative one: a novel to enjoy and ponder, as its characters all do, the dizzying complications inherent in human choice."
—The Washington Times

"I will always be grateful for the presence in the world of Nadine Gordimer, who has delivered in literature a South Africa most of us could not have known without her."
—Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

About the Author:

Nadine Gordimer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, is the author of thirteen novels, nine volumes of stories, and three nonfiction collections. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0374161704
• ISBN 13: 9780374161705
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208