Nadine Gordimer S July S People

For years, it has 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 Smaleses 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.

A terrifyingly plausible vision from one of the most enduring and acclaimed writers in the English language

Nadine Gordimer is one of the most important writers to emerge in the twentieth century. Her anti-Apartheid novel July's People (1981) is a powerful example of resistance writing and continues even now to unsettle easy assumptions about issues of power, race, gender and identity. This guide to Gordimer's compelling novel offers: an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of July's People a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present a selection of new and reprinted critical essays on July's People, providing a range of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key approaches identified in the critical survey cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of July's People and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Gordimer's text.

Set in South Africa, this is the story of Vera Stark, a lawyer and an independent mother of two, who works for the Legal Foundation representing blacks trying to reclaim land that was once theirs. As her country lurches towards majority rule, so she discovers a need to reconstruct her own life.

This rich story collection will be a reminder to Nadine Gordimer's countless admirers, and a taster for the uninitiated, of her enduring imaginative power. A woman gauges the state of her marriage by the tone of her husband's cello; a wife reads her husband's mood by the scent in the nape of his neck; a newly emigrated couple are divided by visual obsession, he with his native Budapest, she with South African suburbia. With consummate artistry, Gordimer illustrates the show downs, standoffs and highlights of human intimacy while penetrating the nuances of immigration, national identity and race.

"This is a novel of enormous power' New Statesman 'Gordimer is a great writer ... It is Turgenev that she most brings to mind' -- New York Review of Books The Booker Prize winning political novel by the Nobel Prize winning author Nadine Gordimer Mehring is rich. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his possessions refuse to remain objects. His wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm.

Each story is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling -- about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being. Their subjects' lives unravel from simple beginnings -- a trip to the hair dresser, a cleaning woman's passion for knitting, lunch in a Chinese restaurant but gradually the veneer of ordinariness is peeled back to expose pain, reveal desire, or express the intensity of joy in color and creation. These stories are all about human beings: about how little we can know (or may care to know) about the people with whom we spend our lives, and how tragic the results of that ignorance or indifference can be.

Nadine Gordimer is one of our most telling contemporary writers. With each new work, she attacks - with a clear-eyed lack of sentimentality, and an understanding of the darkest depths of the human soul - the inextricable link between personal life and political, communal history. The revelation of this theme in each new work, not only in her homeland South Africa, but the twenty-first century world, is evidence of her literary genius: in the sharpness of her psychological insights, the stark beauty of her language, the complexity of her characters and the difficult choices with which they are faced.In No Time Like the Present, Gordimer brings the reader into the lives of Steven Reed and Jabulile Gumede, a 'mixed' couple, both of whom have been combatants in the struggle for freedom against apartheid. Once clandestine lovers under racist law forbidding sexual relations between white and black, they are now in the new South Africa. The place and time where freedom - the 'better life for all' that was fought for and promised - is being created but also challenged by political and racial tensions, while the hangover of moral ambiguities and the vast and growing gap between affluence and mass poverty, continue to haunt the present. No freedom from personal involvement in these or in the personal intimacy of love.The subject is contemporary, but Gordimer's treatment is timeless. In No Time Like the Present, she shows herself once again a master novelist, at the height of her prodigious powers.