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A house gun--kept like a house cat: a fact of ordinary life at the end of this century where violence is in the air. With that gun the architect son of Harald and Claudia has committed what is to them the unimaginable act--shot dead the intimate friend he discovered making love to his woman. And the relationship between the three is revealed to have unimaginable meaning....

How has Duncan come to abandon the sanctity of human life they taught him? What kind of loyalty do parents owe a self-confessed murderer?In post-apartheid South Africa the defense of their son's life is in the hands of a black man: Hamilton Motsamai, a flamboyant, distinguished advocate returned from political exile. The balance of everything in the parents' world is turned upside down.

The House Gun is a passionate narrative of that final text of complex human relations we call love, moving from the intimate to the generalcondition. If it is a parable of present violence it is also an affirmation of the will to reconciliation that starts where it must, between individual men and women.Amazon.com Review
"There is no privacy more inviolable than that of the prisoner. Tovisualize that cell in which he is thinking, to reach what he alone knows;that is a blank in the dark."

Privileged whites in post-apartheid South Africa, Harald and ClaudiaLindgard have managed to live the better part of 50 years without everconfronting the deepest shadows in their culture or in their own souls.Though they conceive of themselves as liberal-minded, neither has evertaken any active political stand; neither has ever been in any blackperson's home. Harald sits on the board of an insurance company; Claudia isa compassionate doctor. Neither of them has ever been inside a courtroombefore; neither has ever been inside a prison. When their architect-son,Duncan, is arrested for murder, both know that the charge is preposterous.But Duncan himself fails to deny his guilt, and his parents are brought bya harsh and ungainly process to accept the possibility that he hascommitted an unthinkable crime.

Nadine Gordimer'sThe House Gun is a gravely sustained explorationof their long-delayed but necessary descent into an intimate acquaintancewith the culture of violence that surrounds them and that is "the commonhell of all who are associated with it." The novel is a mystery, but not inthe usual sense of the whodunit. Here the question of whoquickly gives way to why and thence to other, still deeperquandaries of culpability, both immediate and ultimate. The enigmaticDuncan becomes a dark mirror in which his stunned parents must desperatelygrope for a new vision of themselves and their world--a vision that willnot shatter, as their old one has, under a single blow from reality.

Gordimer's prose is mannered and severe; humor is rare, or absent. "As thecouple emerge into the foyer of the courts, vast and lofty cathedralechoing with the susurration of its different kind of supplicants gatheredthere, Claudia suddenly breaks away, disappearing towards the signindicating toilets. Harald waits for her among these people patient introuble, no choice to be otherwise, for them, he is one of them, the wives,husbands, fathers, lovers, children of forgers, thieves and murderers."This difficult exposition is the reader's own dark mirror, where we asspectators fumble from one dubious explanation to the next--a twistedreflection always reminding us that, underlying this social tragedy, thereis a mystery play in the old sense, and an unanswerable question: What is ahuman being? Paragraph after paragraph, the reader is led into deeper anddeeper perceptions of the sensibilities and the dilemmas of thesecharacters--into a quiet intimacy with their trouble that is sometimesacutely uncomfortable, but which pays off richly in an ending thatreconciles our sense of the horror of violence with our desire to believein the value of each life. --Daniel Hintzsche ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

A jewel of a book!
Fans of thriller-a-minute, page-turners will find this book a drag!

But readers who enjoy good prose and appreciate a talented wordsmiths intricate tapestry will find 'The House Gun' a jewel of a book.

The story involves an upper-middle class family who must suddenly confront the fact that their son could be a murderer. There are enough twists and turns in the plot to hold the readers' interest but it is not so much the story as Nadine Gordimer's prose that makes this novel such a compelling read. Nadine manages to convey the complex human emotions associated with murder and it's defense with a rare, almost stunning clarity. The deliberately-slow narrative and the delineation of the main characters gradually creates, for the reader, what is almost a first-person familiarity with the characters.

The novel is a page-turner alright but not of the who-dun-it variety. Rather one turns the pages of 'The House Gun' spell-bound by the author's artistry.

The House Gun is No Misfire
I'm baffled by the negative reviews this book has garnered here; I suppose it's more of a reaction to Gordimer's subject matter than to her style or content. People are more comfortable with a revolutionary spouting rhetoric that they agree with: if you, as a reader, are still wrapping your brain around the reality of South Africa as it was, Gordimer's earlier works will ring more true with you. If, however, you are interested in the legacy of Apartheid as it is, The House Gun will resonate more. The House Gun, so to speak, will only fire in the direction in which you point it.

As with all Gordimer works, the pace is slow and deliberately so, the words carefully chosen not to describe action but to allow the reader into the minds and souls of people who have lived in circumstances of which the majority of us can hardly conceive. The plot, intriguing though it is, is really secondary to the introspection taken on by each of the accused murderer's parents; the most pressing question, that of choosing to support your child with whatever means you have at your disposal (financial, spiritual, intellectual, emotional)in the face of your indecision as to whether or not you believe his version of events (or if any version of events would be acceptable). If your child murdered someone else, how would you feel? What would you do? Is the social legacy of apartheid going to color your beliefs; what happens when you are "open-minded" (no one ever really is), and your child commits a race crime? Do you use the race card to exonerate him, even when you are repulsed by his choice and behavior? And while the stress of saving your child from what he or she deserves in the course of law taps all of your inner resources, what happens to your marriage, your career, your friendships, your faith? Do you question all of your motives, all of your beliefs, all of your emotions?

I believe that you do. Every crisis, by nature, requires self-examination. It is not always pretty, or easy to accept, what you find at the end of your questioning. Gordimer, here, takes this family's condition, in microcosm, to expose South Africa's current quandary, many years after the abolition of Apartheid. Where do they stand as a society? What do they believe? What is excusable, what is justifiable? Who pays for what has been done, and how? Where will they go? What will be possible? No one knows, and maybe that's too unsettling for most.

Great Alternative to a Sleeping Pill
This book is soporific.I fell asleep every time I picked it up.The opportunity for a meaningful and dynamic book was there but the promise was never kept.Boring!It is unlikely that I will read anything else by this author.Give it to someone you don't like very much.

Disappointing
Gordimer is an excellent writer, but The House Gun finds her far from the top of her game. The plot of the story is certainly intriguing: in post-apartheid South Africa, a man is accused of murdering his lover; his affluent, supposedly liberal parents hire a black attorney to represent him, despite the fact that the parents have never interacted with a black person in their lives. Gordimer has a great deal to say here about the legacy of apartheid, its violence, and about liberal culture, but getting to these messages is arduous. Even by literary standards, the text is dry, devoid of humor and even emotion to the point of being painful, and Gordimer does little to help her cause by adopting such a difficult style, weighting down the text with unpunctuated dialogue and terse prose. Unlike other "challenging" works (read: Faulkner, Joyce, early Gordimer, etc.) that ultimately reward readers for their efforts, The House Gun has a promising start that languishes up to an unsatisfying ending. The reviewer who stated that this is not a work for "best seller" readers is certainly on the mark, but I would go as far as to say that this isn't really much of a book for those of us with high brow tastes. Gordimer has written a number of outstanding books (My Son's Story, Burger's Daughter, and Jump come to mind), but The House Gun falls short of Gordimer's standards. If you love Gordimer, you'll probably read this book anyway, but her new readers (and I highly recommend reading her) should start elsewhere.

so hard to read
it is not worth the try... i am not going to write anything more nor am i going to argue with pseudo intellectuals who find it intriguing because of a new? writing style... It is a completely inhuman book.Scepanovic wrote differently and hardly maybe for some people but in the end what emerged was pure brilliance not the void that dominates this book. The characters are totally boring. sorry ... Read more

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Always exploring the boundaries of race, identity, politics, memory, sexuality, and love with fearless insight and deep compassion, Nadine Gordimer has produced another masterpiece of short fiction. From a former anti-apartheid activist’s search for his own racial identity by tracing his great-grandfather’s part in South Africa’s diamond industry to a parrot that scandalizes people with repetitions of their quarrels and clandestine love-talk, this new collection of stories eloquently probes how people are never free from their past nor spared from loss. ... Read more

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Remains best book about Gordimer
There are now a number of critical studies of the Nobel laureate'sfiction, but none replaces Clingman's authoritative guide.The book provesparticularly useful to American readers, as Clingman provides cogentdiscussions of the historical and political setting of Gordimer'sapartheid-era writing. ... Read more

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This volume collects three decades of interviews with Nadine Gordimer. In the interviews, she presents her attitudes toward her art and its interconnection with the oppressive, volatile politics in her native land. She has traveled extensively to other countries only to discover that no matter how white her skin she is indeed African and the only country she can call home is South Africa. "If you write honestly about life in South Africa, apartheid damns itself," she says. She is ruthlessly honest, and her fiction has played the vital role of communicating in detail to the rest of the world the effects of apartheid upon the daily lives of the South African people. To maintain her integrity, she writes as though she "were dead," without any thought of how anyone will react to what she has written. She remains heroically undaunted both by the banning of three of her novels by the white government and by the protests of radical blacks who assert that whites cannot write convincingly about blacks.She is concerned neither with the image of blacks nor with the image of whites, only with revealing the complexity, the full truth. This truth condemns the racism upon which apartheid is built. In her nine novels and eight volumes of short stories, Gordimer digs deeper and deeper until she has "thematic layers." These include "betrayal-political, sexual, every form" and "power, the way human beings use power in their relationships." Her accounts in these interviews of how she works and of which writers she admires will fascinate readers, scholars, teachers, and students alike. ... Read more

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Toby Hood, a young Englishman, shuns the politics and the causes his liberal parents passionately support. Living in Johannesburg as a representative of his family's publishing company, Toby moves easily, carelessly, between the complacent wealthy white suburbs and the seething, vibrantly alive black townships. His friends include a wide variety of people, from mining directors to black journalists and musicians, and Toby's colonial-style weekends are often interspersed with clandestine evenings spent in black shanty towns. Toby's friendship with Steven Sithole, a dashing, embittered young African, touches him in ways he never thought possible, and when Steven's own sense of independence from the rules of society leads to tragedy, Toby's life is changed forever. ... Read more

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How to reconcile a life lived in two worlds...
If ever a writer told things as they were, without the trappings of self-righteousness, romantic illusion or overwrought interpretation, it is Gordimer. In A World of Strangers, she is a keen reporter of the minutiaeof daily life in 1950s South Africa. Gordimer juxtaposes the dim samenessand shallow veneer of the lavish excess of white South African society lifewith the restricted and sometimes chaotic lives of the South Africanblacks. Gordimer contrasts these polarities facilely, telling the storythrough the eyes of her reluctant protagonist, Toby Hood, an outsider whoarrives from England to work in South Africa. Toby slides in and out of thetwo realities, noticing the differences from the point of view of someonewho is never quite on the inside.

In a general sense, Toby embodies butalso exposes the hypocrisy of South African society: he recognizes itsinjustices but accepts them nevertheless. After reading a tourist pamphlet,Toby observes,"I felt as if I were reading of another country, fromseas away. But then the country of the tourist pamphlet always is anothercountry, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, doesnot exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells andempty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon thebeautiful." Toby is conscious of the plastic unreality of the societylife but like a tourist chooses not to involve himself deeply in thereality.

Gordimer's lasting impression lies in the voices of hercharacters. All multidimensional and playing key roles in Toby's life. AnnaLouw, an attorney, voices parts of Toby's conscience. "`What had youexpected?' she asked with patient interest. With her you felt that yourmost halting utterance was given full attention .This scrutiny of thecliches of perfunctory communication, the hit-or-miss of words inadequateeither to express or conceal, embarrassed me. Like most people, I do notmean half of what I say, and I cannot say half of what I mean; and I do notcare to be made self-conscious of this. Much that is to be communicated isnot stated; but she was the kind of person who accepts nothing until therehas been the struggle to body it forth in words."

By contrast,Toby's lover, Cecil Rowe, a vain and shallow society woman,is the gloss ofToby's life, the one of all too human desires. He cares for her, makes lovewith her, is part of her life, but even so, she is not really a part of hisbecause there is so much of himself that he cannot convey to her.

Mostimportant in the fabric of Toby's life is an African friend, Steven Sitole.Sitole's refusal to abide by the rules white society dictated for him,inspired Toby to thought. Until something unexpected happens, Toby'sthoughtful meanderings are only idle thought. Toby never reevaluated hislife and how he lived it until a tragedy forced Toby to see things in a newway.

Toby's exploration of the two sides of life in South Africa as wellas the balancing act of reconciling each of them is an exploration wellworth reading. Gordimer never strays from the deft and subtle style andanalysis which characterizes all of her work. ... Read more

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In an extraordinary period immediately before the first non-racial election and the beginning of majority rule in South Africa, Vera Stark, the protagonist of Nadine Gordimer's passionate novel, weaves a ruthless interpretation of her own past into her participation in the present as a lawyer representing blacks in the struggle to reclaim the land. The return of exiles is transforming the city, and through the lives of Didymus Maqoma, his wife Sibongile, and their lovely daughter who cannot even speak her parents' African language, the listener experiences the strange passions, reversals, and dangers that accompany new-won access to power. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Wonderful read but...
I really like reading this novel.I thought the characters were very well developed.The relationships between all the characters (major and minor) are so complex that it times is somewhat hard to follow, but I usually found this to make the reading more enjoyable.

The reason I gave it three stars instead of more than that is the racial undercurrents.I call it undercurrents because on the surface it is a novel about acceptance and moving to a new life for the country, but there is so much more below the surface here.I actually found that there was quite a bit of racism in the novel, from the author herself.Before I go on I have to say that she has done incredible work through her fiction and voice for equality in South Africa, but she seems to have racism hardwired into her brain.Her white characters consistently patronize the black characters, especially Vera Stark.Vera seems to think she has to take care of the entire racial population, even when working with people that very obviously don't need her.Her black characters that were in exile and have somewhat become heros to the black populace do everything they can to remove themselves from the black culture and black experience in South Africa.Sibonguile even ponders at one point that she puts on her African gard so she can look more African.I don't know how I feel about the Nobel Prize, because I feel like she got it for the politics behind her novels.And I believe that her politics are consistently subjected racist ideas that are mostly sub-conscious.

With all that said it is still an amazing novel worth picking up!

Lost me
I could not get into this book at all.The method of writing was very hard to follow.I couldn't tell who was talking most of the time.If there were more than two people in a conversation, forget it.I often had to go back to the begin of the conversation and try to figure it out.There also seemed to be more detail about the "politics" of South Africa than I cared to know or be able to understand.Granted there may be some that would enjoy this, but it lost me.The only thing that kept me from rating this with 1 star is that I did like the ultimate message of the book.I just would have preferred that the message be given it a bit more understandable fashion.

ReInventing Notions of National Identity
Nadine Gordimer's novel None to Accompany Me was published in the same year of South Africa's first Democratic election. The fact that these events coincided is an important influence on interpretations of the novel because of the personal and political significance of the event in relation to Gordimer. A preoccupation with the conflicting political parties reverberates in the consciousness of the South African characters who populate the novel because of the radical nature of this changing government. The characters are captured in a state of transformation where they must renegotiate their own sense of national identity. Gordimer lived through the age of apartheid in South Africa. She always renounced it, discussing its inherent flaws and misconceptions in her fiction and nonfiction. The fact that she defiantly chose not to exile herself in the face of political conflict while writing novels which were mainly in opposition to the National Party who enforced apartheid shows her unswerving commitment to an identification with being a South African citizen who works actively against racism. In a society such as South Africa that has a highly turbulent climate of racism Gordimer has found that a sense of "home" is an important component upon which to build an environment of equality. The physical nation is what its citizens have in common and, in negotiating boundaries, mental and emotional divides are laid out as well. Therefore, her emphasis on the importance of the land in her writing, how it is sectioned off, claimed and divided, represents the way South Africans have divided their national identity from having any singular meaning. Gordimer has represented in her fiction the levels of these boundaries between people and she has offered a constructive approach to possibly thinking of South African national identity as inclusive of difference while accepting the pragmatism of boundaries. In her early essays of the 1960s she shows a strong resolution that the inherently racist government would be replaced by a power which enforces greater equality. Yet, she also realized that the most important transformation needed to occur in the minds of the citizens of South Africa. They had to recognize the fact of racial difference but also acknowledge that everyone who lives in South Africa is entitled to equal citizenship.

Due to the governmentally enforced segregation between the different races, citizens found that living in South Africa under apartheid caused a hypersensitive awareness of his or her own race. Gordimer is no exception to this and has spent much of her writing discussing where white people position themselves in relation to black people. She tries to think out how people can change their frame of mind to assimilate to the idea of a South Africa where people have an equal sense of national identity instead of trapping themselves within terms of binaries. She makes this clear in her statement, "If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay in Africa." What she seems to be saying is that to live peacefully in a nation you must accept you are entitled to be a citizen of that nation rather than an outsider who happens to inhabit it. This is a dilemma for white Africans who live under the image of "black Africa". To be African does not necessarily mean that you are black. This is something Gordimer has always vehemently asserted in her writing. It is in the fixed idea of "black Africa" that boundaries within the national identity are laid and Gordimer is committed to writing of Africa as inclusive of all the relations between its people of all colors. Both the National Party and the Inkath Movement stressed physical boundaries between white and black people. The impact they had on South African citizens over the 20th century encouraged the idea of a national identity divided by color. It is only with the end of apartheid and subsequently the first democratic national election that South Africans can evaluate the impact this division has had with hindsight and whether or not they choose to leave it behind.

A major theme of the novel is how to reconcile the ideological transformation taking place politically in South Africa with the personal notions of national identity formulated up to the present time. For people who worked to terminate apartheid, it is difficult to envision any progression when the primary motives of one's actions are committed to ending the politically instituted segregation. Personal actions were planned with thought of a watchful government eye. For the majority of the writing there could be no subject other than the institutionalized racism. It became a polemic for a political position whether direct or indirect that perpetuated itself in all the literature produced. Only now that apartheid has ended and a new political group has succeeded to power can South African individuals envision a future that is not strictly concerned with this national condition. Gordimer is trying to capture in None to Accompany Me the moment of this change through personal transformations: "Perhaps the passing away of the old regime makes the abandonment of an old personal life also possible. I'm getting there." Leaving an old notion of national identity behind may make possible the dispensing of an old sense of selfhood. This illustrates the uncertainty of the people who live under this changing government to decide upon how they will perceive their sense of self now that an essential factor of what they perceive to be their identity has changed. The primary subject of this novel then is the omnipresent transformations taking place in South Africa at that time ranging from the personal to the broadly political. This novel is an important work that captures a nation in the midst of dramatic change. It will teach you about the conflicts in South Africa if you have never read much about it before and prompt you to find out more.

Disappointing, in comparison with Gordimer's body of work
Having read the entire catalog of Gordimer's work, I find None to Accompany Me somewhat disappointing. While it had moments in which the reader could feel at one with the story's characters, I did not feelengaged by the story nor the insights Gordimer offers. Part of what makesGordimer so appealing is her ability to put into words what most peoplejust think and cannot articulate. As well, Gordimer puts fresh perspectiveson various issues that make her work constantly thought-provoking. I felt abit deflated upon discovering that None to Accompany Me was not going tooffer the same sort of stimuli.

Thought-provoking but not always compelling
I do not know quite what to make of Nadine Gordimer's 1994 novel None to Accompany Me. Gordimer, past winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, writes tellingly of her native South Africa, and of the uneasy relationsbetween blacks and whites during the very recent past.This book tells thestory of Vera, a middle-aged married white woman who is employed as alawyer with a "liberal" organization dedicated to obtaininghousing and land for the black majority.While Vera has"relationships" with many in the book, both black and white -including her current husband (a past lover); former husband; grownchildren; and black employees of her organization and political leaders -ultimately she makes herselfa loner, with only her career and transitoryrelationships.I believe this is the source of the book's title - Vera hasnone to accompany her, and the reason for this appears to be her own lackof commitment to all save her cause.Gordimer writes with great insightand intelligence, and I very much wanted to enjoy this book more than Idid.Her characters are finely drawn, allowing the reader to "getinside" their thinking; nonetheless, this novel did not always keep myattention. Because she is such a fine writer in general, and this book hasso many flashes of brilliance and insight, I cannot discourage others fromreading it.Perhaps I just am not the right reader for this book.(Irecommend highly and without qualification her earlier novel July'sPeople). ... Read more

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When her ex-husband commits suicide after the failure of his anti-government activities, Liz Van Den Sandt struggles todecide whether to become involved the South African Black nationalist movement. ... Read more

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A good read but not her best
This is a good short read and well worth the few hours it takes to get through it, but it is an earlier novel and not one of her best. If you haven't yet read any Nadine Gordimer, I recommend that first you try"None to Accompany Me," which is excellent. ... Read more

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With her characteristic brilliance, Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer follows the inner lives of characters confronted by unforeseen circumstances. An earthquake offers tragedy and opportunity in the title story, exposing both an ocean bed strewn with treasure and the avarice of the town’s survivors. "Mission Statement" is the story of a bureaucrat’s idealism, the ghosts of colonial history, and a love affair with a government minister that ends astoundingly. And in "Karma," Gordimer’s inventiveness knows no bounds: in five returns to earthly life, a disembodied narrator, taking on different ages and genders, testifies to unfinished business and questions the nature of existence. Revelatory and powerful, these are stories that challenge our deepest convictions even as they dazzle us with their artful lyricism. ... Read more

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Unfinished business
An air of the surreal weaves through some of the stories in this intriguing collection of short fiction. As an astute and engaged observer of social realities at home and globally, South African Nadine Gordimer brilliantly captures ordinary people's lives as they attempt to make sense of it, more or less successfully. And then, there is usually an unexpected twist towards the end of each story - some giving a future perspective in a different voice, inviting the reader to ponder varied possibilities.

Nadine Gordimer, multiple award winner, including of the Nobel Prize in 1991, is well known and admired for her short fiction. Here, she brings together a novella, a number of portraits of normal people with very brief fragments ormusings based around a specific news event, such as a tsunami in the title story, "Loot"."The Generation Gap" is a light hearted, ironic look at the squabbles of grown-up children about their widowed father who falls in love with a violinist of their own age.Something surreal happens with a group of professors in "Look Alike", another tongue in cheek story, yet with an allegoric message.The novella "The Mission Statement" is the most traditional of the stories in the collection.The central figure is a middle-aged English foreign aid worker experiencing her first African assignment. Her story is a surprising departure from the rest of the collection, both in tone and substance: very down to earth and, despite the intended surprise ending, completely realistic.

"Karma", the final segment is in itself a collection of vignettes, held together by a linking voice - that of a forever returning spirit-child. Anybody who has read the hauntingly beautiful The Famished Road by Booker Prize winner, Ben Okri, will remember the importance of the spirit-child in African cultures.Gordimer introduces such a spirit, develops it into one that is capable of memory and learning, who returns again and again, initially as an afterthought sprinkled into some of the short pieces. Yet in "Karma", it takes an important reflective role, linking the individual vignettes together. She expands the concept of "karma", building around it some of the most evocative pieces in the whole collection: love, race, relationships, society's explicit or implicit restrictions. As the title suggests, Hindu beliefs are also reflected upon by the returning spirit. The question remains at the end whether the need to return to the world to overcome the faults or weaknesses of the previous life does not in itself lead to "an unfinished business".

Gordimer's language is spare and efficient, her people descriptions vivid and precise. The detached tone and approach she demonstrates to her subjects does, however, not deny them emotional depth. Oblique references to brutality and conflict during the Apartheid period in South Africa are interwoven with the lives of her characters, in some cases contrasted with the post-Apartheid potential for a new beginning or ending.Nevertheless the stories reach beyond their locale in addressing common human aspirations and preoccupations. All of them leave room for the reader to ponder and expand on ideas and questions raised. [Friederike Knabe]

In a class by herself
Gordimer's use of language is beyond what the ordinary story teller employs. Her words are nuanced, metaphorical, and indirect in ways that let you mentally fill in the gaps and is very satisfying to one as the reader. I don't know of anyone who writes quite like her. Her stories are not plot driven and seem to evoke something profound about the characters' humanity that is difficult to describe. There are ordinary situations in some of her stories that are so vividly expressed, that they never leave your mind. Her writing is in a class of its own.

Well written but a bit dry
The characters of the short stories in Loot seem to be held an arm's length from their readers; even in the lofty "Karma", a story told from the viewpoint of a soul, the meat of life is there but the juice is missing. I didn't feel any moments of clarity or great inspiration, no need to copy down any passages for future reference. Luckily, this book is a quick read, so not much investment needed time-wise.
If you enjoy politics and are an unsentimental, analytical thinker, you'll like this. If you're an artist, emotional, or creative in any way, I'd move on. ... Read more

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concise, lucid story telling
Gordimer tells simple, strong stories that are timed perfectly for a conclusion that leaves the reader sadened or concerned. SHe beautifully and subtlely shines a light into life in S. Africa by using white maincharacters, but showing black fears and consequences. Each story describesa different part of life in the country: urban, rural, in a cheiftanship,through the eyes of a black man, through the eyes of a white woman... ... Read more

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Situated at the intersection of the colonial and the postcolonial, the modern and the postmodern, the novelists Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer all bear witness to this century's global transformations. From the Margins of Empire looks at how the question of national identity is constructed in their writings. These authors--white women who were born or grew up in British colonies or former colonies--reflect the subject of national identity in vastly different ways in both their lives and their work. Stead, who resided outside of her native Australia, has an unsettled identity. Lessing, who grew up in southern Rhodesia and migrated to England, is or has become English. Gordimer, who was born in South Africa and remains there, considers herself South African.

Louise Yelin shows how the three writers' different national identities are inscribed in their fiction. The invented, hybrid character of nationality is, she maintains, a constant throughout. Locating the writings of Stead, Lessing, and Gordimer in the national cultures that produced and read them, she considers the questions they raise about the roles that whites, especially white women, can play in the new political and cultural order. ... Read more

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This is an analytical survey of the works of three notable female writers of post-colonial societies: South Africa's Nadine Gordimer, India's Nayantara Sahgal, and Nigeria's Buchi Emecheta. The author contends that the three novelists tend to subsume social and economic categorizations under one dominant mode. For Gordimer, race dictates political identity and behavior; for Sahgal, class determines the appropriateness of political leadership; while for Emecheta, gender power controls and dominates political action. The implications of this for the nature of post-colonial political fiction, according to the author, are that narrative voice and political identity are in a state of flux. The three novelists are articulate and expressive with regard to race, class and gender, and in examining them together, this book shows that the post-colonial woman is part of a plurality or continuum in which she moves in various positions, depending on what ideology is imposed on and by her. The post-colonial woman is represented as a figure that is being constantly displaced or a voice that perpetually resists within a discourse that is evolving and shifting. She is at once elite and powerless, at once subversive and exploitative. This book analyzes the attempts of these three novelists to come to terms with the neo-colonial and patriarchal ideology that surrounds and limits them. ... Read more