True Fiction

Nadine Gordimer has been awarded the French Legion of Honour. In the words of the French ambassador to South Africa: "We also wish to pay tribute to a symbolic figure of the fight against apartheid, that absurd and terrible system that sought, unrealistically to separate races." And this is from a 2004 interview with the author: "There is more truth in my fiction than in nonfiction. I think, subconsciously, [if] I am writing an article or talking to you, there is a certain amount of self-censorship going on. But in my fiction I am writing as if I were dead. I want to say it all. I want to say everything I know."