For over 60 years, Nadine Gordimer has chronicled South Africa’s changing political climate. Her final novel, No Time Like the Present (2012), has therefore been received primarily as fictionalised historiography that traces and reflects on the woes and the accomplishments of the young democracy. However, so far, this narrow emphasis on historical reality has led to the neglect of the imaginative vision of the novel. I would like, instead, to pursue two contrastive readings. In ‘Writing Back,’ I will read the novel as political chronicle and lay out to what degree it advocates historical contingency. In reflecting on the ‘present’ as perennially troubled by former apartheid policy, it provides insight into the specific historical period of the first decade of the new millennium. In ‘Reading Forward,’ I will shift the focus to Gordimer’s aesthetics, in particular her language, style and character conceptualisation to align Gordimer’s political project with her aesthetic one, ultimately allowing for form and content to be framed as one intricate coherent whole.

60 多年来，Nadine Gordimer 记录了南非不断变化的政治气候。她的最后一部小说《没有时间像现在》（2012 年），因此主要被视为虚构的历史学，它追溯和反映了年轻民主的困境和成就。然而，迄今为止，这种对历史现实的狭隘强调，导致了对小说想象力视野的忽视。相反，我想追求两种对比性的解读。在“回信”中，我将把这部小说当作政治编年史来解读，并阐述它在多大程度上提倡历史偶然性。在反思长期受到前种族隔离政策困扰的“现在”时，它提供了对新千年头十年特定历史时期的洞察。在“向前阅读”中，我将把重点转移到戈迪默的美学上，特别是她的语言、风格和人物概念化，以使戈迪默的政治项目与她的美学项目保持一致，