SOURCE: Jacobs, Johan U. “Finding a Safe House of Fiction in Nadine Gordimer's Jump and Other Stories.” In Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, edited by Jacqueline Bardolph, pp. 197-204. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.

In the following essay, Jacobs asserts that Jump and Other Stories represents an important stage in Gordimer's political and literary development, as it begins to explore postapartheid political and social issues.

Nadine Gordimer's fictional achievement has been to present “history from the inside”:¹ A World of Strangers (1958), Occasion for Loving (1963), The Late Bourgeois World (1966), The Conservationist (1974), Burger's Daughter (1979) and July's People (1981) all depict South African lives overdetermined by the rise and fall of the apartheid state. The narrative of apartheid South Africa, Gordimer writes in My Son's Story, has been “a centripetal force that draws people […] out of the fascination of commitment to political struggle.”²

In A Sport of Nature, in 1987, Gordimer leads her reader...