BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Gordimer did not read the same book that I did. She may have been confused by the subject matter of the other three books which she notes, Memories of My Dying Wives, Inez, and Human Stain. I read Fuentes and recall the book as intense and detailed about the sexual conduct of the last years of a man's life--but I see nothing of that in Everyman.

Everyman deals with the anguish of regret and the mystery of what we are in contrast to what we might have been. There is more truth in the anguish of the bleak desolation in which Everyman has trapped himself than there was in his previous fifty years, when impulse and whim compassed his path.

The strength to search for the love he has tossed aside eludes him, his life is shattered by decrepitude. He dies suddenly without expecting death on the operating table, alone among strangers. He feels no lust on the table while he awaits the surgeons knife.

I think that Gordimer misses all this because she is surrounded by family and friends at every turn in the road.