Nadine Gordimer

South African novelist and short-story writer, who received Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. Most of Nadine Gordimer's works deal with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. She was a founding member of Congress of South African Writers, and even at the height of the apartheid regime, she never considered going into exile. [Read more]

July's People
Penguin Books, 1984 (PhP 100.00)
For years, it had been what is called a "deteriorating situation." Now all over South Africa the cities are battlegrounds. The members of the Smales family--liberal whites--are rescued from the terror by their servant, July, who leads them to refuge in his native village. What happens to the Smales and to July--the shifts in character and relationships--gives us an unforgettable look into the terrifying, tacit understandings and misunderstandings between blacks and whites.

Contemporary Writers: Nadine Gordimer
A Critical Study by Judie Newman
Routledge, 1988 (PhP 80.00)
International in her appeal, Nadine Gordimer is both a vociferous opponent of apartheid, and an original and accomplished novelist whose works have found literary and popular recognition. In this critical study, the first by a woman, Judie Newman discusses all Gordimer's novels, including the most recent, "A Sport of Nature." Gordimer's writing is both politically committed and formally innovative, confronting subject matter of great contemporary interest and at the same time seeking out narrative forms which combine European and indigenous cultures. Her novels are sensitive to their context, in a divided society, while also offering an important contribution to postmodernist reassessments of narrative poetics, and a conscious challenge to European conceptions of the novel. Judie Newman places particular emphasis upon Gordimer's searching investigation of the relation of gender to genre, and explores other major concerns such as the crisis of liberal values, the nature of historical consciousness, racism, sexual politics, and the psychopathology of power. Her study combines close literary analysis with a wide-ranging exploration of ideas, showing clearly how the artist can contribute to contemporary debate.