Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Gordimer, Nadine (Vol. 123) - The Times Literary Supplement (review date 22 July 1965)

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The Times Literary Supplement (review date 22 July 1965)

SOURCE: "Alone, Obsessed, Outsmarted," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 3308, July 22, 1965, p. 609.

[In the following excerpt, the critic highlights the theme of lonliness in Not for Publication.]

Although Miss Nadine Gordimer's scene in her short stories is often South Africa, and her themes therefore often have to do with the colour bar, she is not an explicitly "liberal" writer: she nearly always writes of the best, the most humane side of her characters—even the thick-headed policemen who arrest the gallant Mrs. Bamjee for her anti-racialist activities in "A Chip of Glass Ruby" are decently abashed and sorry (as far as their natures will allow them) for what they have to do. Miss Gordimer's real theme is loneliness—the loneliness of all kinds of exile (of, for example, "free" South African Nationalists who are being trained in sabotage in a free republic, or of...

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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