Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Gordimer, Nadine (Vol. 17) - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (essay date 1984)

Gordimer, Nadine (Vol. 17) - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (essay date 1984)

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (essay date 1984)

SOURCE: A review of Something Out There, in The New York Times, July 9, 1984, p. C17.

[Lehmann-Haupt is a Scottish-born American critic. In the following favorable review, he explores the varying narrative techniques employed in Something Out There.]

Betrayal, crimes of conscience, the anguish of apartheid—the themes are familiar in this fine new collection of nine stories and a novella by Nadine Gordimer, most of them set in her native South Africa. What is surprising is the behavior of her characters. In one, a black woman you believe to be falling in love with a terrorist, whom she and her husband are hiding in their home, ends up going to the police and reporting the fugitive.

In another, a man who admits to his lover that he has been spying on her is answered by an embrace, we finish the story wondering who really has undermined whom. In "Letter From His Father" Hermann...

[The entire page is 935 words long]

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