Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer whose novels include The Conservationist, for which she won the Booker McConnell Prize in 1974, and July’s People, lives in South Africa. The story published in this issue is from a collection entitled Something Out There which will be published by Jonathan Cape next March. The sources for the story, ‘Letter from his Father’, are Ronald Hayman’s K: A Biography of Kafka and Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser’s translation of Kafka’s Wedding Preparations and Other Pieces.

Story: ‘Letter from his Father’

Nadine Gordimer, 20 October 1983

My dear son,

Whether or not it will actually happen, it seems clear that America is planning its next global intervention on behalf of the new century to be in Iran. As with Iraq, the ostensible motive or...

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Nothing Terrible Happened: Nadine Gordimer

Sophie Harrison, 14 January 2002

In an unidentified South African city that is probably Johannesburg, in a time that is probably now, a group of people meet in a bohemian café. For 28-year-old Julie it’s not just a...

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Pale Ghosts

Jeremy Harding, 12 January 1995

Dan Jacobson grew up in the diamond town of Kimberley, South Africa. England was one of the places he looked to for inspiration. As it turned out, his interest in English literature and his habit...

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Dry Eyes

John Bayley, 5 December 1991

A Jane Austen of today is barely imaginable: but it one nonetheless imagines her, and locates her in South Africa, how would she be exercising her art? Could she find any subject other than the...

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What his father gets up to

Patrick Parrinder, 13 September 1990

A novelist’s freedom, Nadine Gordimer wrote in 1975, is ‘his right to maintain and publish to the world a deep, intense, private view of the situation in which he finds his...

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Vies de Bohème

D.A.N. Jones, 23 April 1987

For almost forty years Nadine Gordimer has been publishing gallant and sensitive stories deploring the apartheid system in her native South Africa. Every book is received with respectful, almost...

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Saboteurs

Sylvia Clayton, 5 April 1984

Nadine Gordimer continues to send sane, humane reports from the edge of darkness. In her finest stories she fixes authoritatively the experience of her South African characters, who exist in the...

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Test Case

Robert Taubman, 3 September 1981

With ‘nothing else to do but the impossible’, when revolution breaks out in South Africa, Bam and Maureen Smales accept their house servant’s offer of refuge in his tribal...

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