Hubo un tiempo en que habÃa negros que querÃan reivindicarse como blancos. Ahora es un blanco quien se reivindica como negro. Y por las mismas razones., escribe Nadine Gordimer en Beethoven tenÃa algo de negro, el cuento que da tÃtulo a este volumen en el que la escritora sudafricana, galardonada con el premio Nobel en 1991, presenta una serie de historias cuyos protagonistas viven inmersos en los problemas y contradicciones del mundo actual. Con fino sentido del humor y profundidad humana, Gordimer logra dar forma al ámbito personal y polÃtico alrededor del que giran las trams de estos cuentos escritos con pasión y sabidurÃa. / In this collection of new stories Nadine Gordimer crosses the frontiers of politics, memory, sexuality, and love with the fearless insight that is the hallmark of her writing. In the title story a middle-aged academic who had been an anti-apartheid activist embarks on an unadmitted pursuit of the possibilities for his own racial identity in his great-grandfathers fortune-hunting interlude of living rough on diamond diggings in South Africa, his young wife far away in London. Dreaming of the Dead conjures up a lunch in a New York Chinese restaurant where Susan Sontag and Edward Said return in surprising new avatars as guests in the dream of a loving friend. The historian in History is a parrot who confronts people with the scandalizing voice reproduction of quarrels and clandestine love-talk on which it has eavesdropped.Alternative Endings considers the way writers make arbitrary choices in how to end storiesand offers three, each relating the same situation, but with a different resolution, arrived at by the three senses: sight, sound, and smell.
