[Chase is an American novelist, children's author, educator, and critic. In the following review, she examines the style and scope of Friday's Footprint.]

Whenever a careful reader makes the rare discovery that what is purposely not said on the pages before him is clearly far more important and filled with meaning than what is said, he reads yet again and with sharpened perception. Nadine Gordimer in these twelve short stories [in Friday's Footprint] and a longer one which she calls a novella often obscures or upon occasion omits occurrences, surroundings, dialogue, but only because by so doing she can more acutely and fully capture, or make, or at times restore a complete experience. The actual happenings which she deals with in these remarkably real and moving stories take place in various parts of her native Africa from Cairo to Johannesburg. They have to do with crocodile hunting at night, with the ironic and painful degradation of men and women, with a generous invitation which brings ruin and desolation in its wake, with a tropical river and its awful toll exacted both of the living and the dead, and with a wide variety of persons, Afrikaners and blacks, construction engineers and naturalists, small children, adolescents, and the old.

Yet the fact that all her characters and situations are engrossing as pure story material really means comparatively little in the face of their superb—shall we even say perfect? —presentation. They may and do "spread knowledge of things new," in Sainte-Beuve's words; but their real accomplishment through Miss Gordimer's gifted mind is, as the French critic adds, "to lend freshness to things known." Each story or incident probes mercilessly into human motives and human weaknesses, into guilt, fear, disillusionment, ambition, despair. Each reveals the universal human condition, whether in a Boer community or in Chicago, Paris, Hollywood, or the most isolated village anywhere at all. One knows all these people, for they are quite clearly oneself as seldom seen and less seldom honestly recognized and dealt with.

Perhaps every one of these brief narratives, for some of them are hardly stories in the accepted sense of the term, might be called a flash of insight or a moment of vision at a critical, often terrible, instant, whether in the life of a child, of a frightened, defeated woman, or of an unhappy, bewildered husband. Sometimes this piercing insight is realized by a chance, ill-timed remark, by a taste, a smell, a sound; at another time through a mass of blossoming cosmos by an African roadside. In each and every case it is revealing, often cruelly so, and not only to the hearer and the beholder, but to the reader as well. A great deal has been written about "the craft of fiction." Here it is wonderfully exemplified together with the art as well.

Anthologists who compile volumes of "the best stories" must not miss this book. College instructors whose task it is "to teach the short story" will find enough here to teach themselves as well as their students. And most of us who try to write fiction will find reason for despair, or, if we are generous enough, for hope in its larger sense as well as for unqualified admiration.