Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Gordimer, Nadine (Vol. 123) - Rosemary Dinnage (review date 9 September 1994)

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Rosemary Dinnage (review date 9 September 1994)

SOURCE: "In a Far-off Country," in Times Literary Supplement, September 9, 1994, p. 20.

[In the following review, Dinnage outlines the narrative of None to Accompany Me.]

For forty years Nadine Gordimer has been revealing to us the splendours and miseries of life in her extraordinary country; now in this latest novel [None to Accompany Me] she takes us through the dramatic and confused transitional period just before the establishment of South African majority rule.

The narrative (there is no "story" in the usual sense) centres on two couples, one white and one black, and parallel with the political events that carry them along, is an account of the vicissitudes of long marriages. Vera Stark (the name must indicate special endorsement for the character) has been married since the 1940s to Bennet. She has two secrets: their elder son may actually have been fathered by the...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Charles Poore (review date 8 May 1965)
   2. Adrian Mitchell (review date 23 May 1965)
   3. The Times Literary Supplement (review date 22 July 1965)
   4. Patrick Cruttwell (review date Autumn 1965)
   5. Gail Godwin (review date April 1976)
   6. George Kearns (review date Winter 1984–85)
   7. Sylvia Clayton (review date 15-18 April 1984)
   8. Judie Newman (essay date 1985)
   9. Dick Roraback (review date 6 October 1991)
   10. John Bayley (review date 5 December 1991)
   11. Barbara J. Eckstein (essay date Winter 1992)
   12. Nadine Gordimer with Claudia Dreifus (interview date January 1992)
   13. Thomas Knipp (essay date Spring 1993)
   14. Graham Huggan (essay date Winter 1994)
   15. Rosemary Dinnage (review date 9 September 1994)
   16. Richard Eder (review date 18 September 1994)
   17. Richard Bausch (review date 25 September 1994)
   18. Michael Wood (review date 1 December 1994)
   19. Jeremy Harding (review date 12 January 1995)
   20. Philip Graham (review date 5 November 1995)
   21. Nancy Topping Bazin (essay date 1995)
   22. Edith Milton (review date June 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Nadine Gordimer