If you want real African literature, skip Poisonwood Bible, and read Nadine Gordimer's Lying Days. She powerfully reveals the many layers of South African life back in the days of the Struggle without advancing her own political agenda or point of view. Gordimer's unabashed prose will break your soul with its brilliant clarity and eloquence.

I couldn't have timed my reading of this book any better. The book's treatment of the artistic conciousness vs. the social conscience is excellent. Nadine Gordimer is one of the very few authors who has managed to indulge her creative side and be an activist for social change. This inspires me.

A compilation of essays by Ms. Gordimer not to be overlooked by those of us "burnt out" on societal issues...or even personal issues. A heartfull of optimism and honesty that I found refreshing. I read this while walking my daily treadmills at the gym after my daily treadmills at my job. Often feeling weary of life's struggles, I choose to look at others's woes for distraction (usually the newspaper). Reading her thoughts and essays I couldn't help but be inspired not only by her optimism and honesty and her unflagging belief and value in people, but also her analytic mind. She's obviously not afraid to think deeply about peoples and is not afraid to "get personal". I read the book late last year and will probably pick it up again or another of hers. I quit my 19 years of successful employment in the private sector and am now considering non-profit work, thanks to Ms. Gordimer and others like her.

There are now a number of critical studies of the Nobel laureate's fiction, but none replaces Clingman's authoritative guide. The book proves particularly useful to American readers, as Clingman provides cogent discussions of the historical and political setting of Gordimer's apartheid-era writing.

Gordimer tells simple, strong stories that are timed perfectly for a conclusion that leaves the reader sadened or concerned. SHe beautifully and subtlely shines a light into life in S. Africa by using white main characters, but showing black fears and consequences. Each story describes a different part of life in the country: urban, rural, in a cheiftanship, through the eyes of a black man, through the eyes of a white woman...

It has been several years since I read this novel, and what sticks in my memory vividly is the portrait Gordimer creates of a self-satisfied, white property-owner in apartheid-era South Africa. We see the world through his eyes, and we see how well it serves him, keeping him wealthy and comfortable. While he may notice that some suffer and are oppressed, he is not moved to do anything that would make a difference for them. Instead, he justifies his indifference with a sense of racial and class superiority.

Gordimer captures the mental framework of someone who feels little or nothing for the misfortunes of others. What is interesting for the reader is that it requires an effort to step out of his mind and see his thoughts and behavior for what they are -- insensitive, self-serving, and at times brutal.

Gordimer finds him at a time in his life when he is middle-aged and living alone, no longer married, his grown son estranged from him, and his mistress not all that endeared to him. While money, property, and influence keep him at a safe distance from the political troubles slowly encroaching on his private world, Gordimer reveals his physical and emotional isolation. His defense is to cut his losses and retreat even farther into his solitary world. It's a fascinating, well-written character study.

I have never been in SA, but every one can watch the news these days. This book depicts this country from both sides, the blacks and the whites, in a very realistic way. It seems like both people don't really make it work, because of mistakes they both make out of their own culture. It is one of those books that you will not forget, and for a good reason it is one of her most famous ones.
higly recommended.

Gordimer's Booker-prize winning novel is one of the least overtly political of her works--at least in the most traditional understanding of "political fiction" (fiction about the machinations of state power). Yet the book remains a forceful, intricate exploration of power, as timely today as it was in 1974, as relevant to contemporary America as it was to minority-ruled South Africa. I have read--and written about--each of Gordimer's novels, and The Conservationist remains a favorite. Nowhere else in contemporary English-language fiction have I found such memorable passages about landscape; nowhere else have I found such a subtle exploration of self. I recommend the novel to anyone remotely interested in the modernist novel, to anyone who has ever sat under the spell of Virginia Woolf (Gordimer, too, is a Woolf reader), to anyone who turns to literature for both Beauty and that old hound Truth.

Every Sunday the strains of the Radetsky March are heard outside the residence of Baron von Trotta, son of the lieutenant who saved Emperor Franz Joseph's life at Solferino and father of Lieutenant Carl Joseph who saves the Emperor's portrait from a whorehouse. (Thus have times changed!) As this book narrates the saga of four generations of the von Trotta family and the parallel decline of Franz Joseph's Austro-Hungarian Empire, the strains of this march dwindle until it, too, is finally obliterated.

Roth's masterpiece touches us as he deftly depicts the disillusionment that inevitably replaces the once-elevated code of honor of an outdated Empire. The book's style, that of an omniscient author reminiscent of nineteenth-century aesthetics, complements its subject. Here is a glimpse of a world where military and social rank dictate behavior, where women are seductresses regardless of social pretenses, where servants are endowed with unquestioning loyalty, where Jews live on the fringes of society yet must also subscribe to its rigorous decorum. Yet, as the exploits of the youngest von Trotta illustrate, this world has become decadent in its rigidity.

For the von Trottas, as for the Hapsburgs themselves, this discovery comes at a time when one cannot escape its consequences. For it is the rhythms of the Radetsky March, along with the portrait of the Hero of Solferino (whose heroism is not all that it was made out to be) that shaped even the youngest von Trotta and remain forever in the background, preventing a return to the family's peasant heritage and the romanticism of a more idyllic existence.

Roth's book is well worth the read. It is especially endowed with a gentle irony that bespeaks compassion without indulging in sentimentality. For those of us still trying to understand what formed the Western world of the twentieth century, it abounds with all the poignant music, imagery, and people of pre-World War I conditions in Eastern Europe.

This novel is the story of a world that is disappearing fast, and of people desperately clinging to its traditions in an attempt to avoid the chaos fast approaching. The setting is the early 20th century in the last days of the Kaiser's long rule. The destiny of a family of peasants suddenly changes when an ancestor saves the life of the young Kaiser in battle--the legend of the Hero of Solferino follows son and then grandson, making a career in the military almost inevitable despite its being completely wrong from the grandson's point of view. The military in this tale seems a refuge for men much more interested in drinking and gambling than dealing with growing unrest in the Empire. The details of this fast disappearing world are beautifully drawn--the music, the uniforms, the portraits of the Kaiser everywhere, the society of the time--and the reader's knowledge of the devastation of the First World War about to come lends a poignancy to it all that I found almost sad. A terrific historical novel!

This is a novel so good that it is hard to find anything critical to say about it.Perhaps the reader needs to know a bit about the end of the Habsburg Monarchy first- try the relevant chapter of a good history textbook.Other than that ,this is a work of astonishing qualitites. The prose is written with extraordinary care: Roth's description of the appearance of things is beautiful in itself and becomes even more so when you realise that he is recording the details of a vanished way of life. There are scenes which really do deserve the overworked adjective 'unforgettable'.His prose is so clear, economical and precise that you have to compare him to somebody like Tolstoy. This book is hardly known at all in the English-speaking countries, which is a very great shame. Roth disapproved of his characters' actions and the Empire in which they lived and yet he managed to make me genuinely mourn the end of both the Habsburg Empire and the Trotta family.

An alternative title for this novel could be Amayer's rut.
For that is the situation that the main protagonist in this novel finds himself in. Almayer is a European trader living in a
trading post somewhere in Indonesia or Malaysia with his daughter,a product of mixed marriage.
Almayer dreams of escaping to Europe after making himself wealthy and bringing his daughter with him also.
But as time drags on it becomes obvious that he is going nowhere with his life. He is not getting richer nor is he getting any younger. His own daughter ends up deserting him by eloping with a native who takes her to his own village.
Not being a pure European by blood she realizes that she would never be accepted as an equal among Europeans or the whites.
For this reason she chooses instead to live with the natives.
As for Almayer he remains as he was.
He is an example that one can find everywhere in the world.
Someone stuck in a situation going nowhere but always dreaming of getting out and changing his life.

Almayer's folly is a powerful beginning to Conrad's second profession, writing. Since the story was written so close to Conrad's adventurous youth (the spring for his most powerful works), it provides the rawest expression of Conrad's views. Almayer, the prototype of Tuan Jim, takes the "leap" when he marries the Malay captive for promised wealth. This transgression drops his character into contact with the cold truths of nature; truths which dispel any artificial illusions or meanings. For Almayer, these illusions entailed sucess and fame in Europe, a place that he had never visited but only heard about from his mother. Superficially, this journey towards inner truth involves a journey into the wilds of Borneo, but,like in future Conrad works, we quickly realize that the journey is inward into the pysche of Almayer. Overall, an excellent introduction to Conrad.

Loosely based on the life of a Dutch merchant, setting up a trading post along a river in the interior of Borneo, Conrad's novel 'Almayer's Folly' is actually about man's alienation from his environment and eventually himself.

Written during the heyday of western imperialism, when the great powers of Europe subjected the tropics to their rule, the tale of Almayer explores how the tropics actually devoured the individual westerner.

The main character of the book is a man obsessed. Chasing a dream, he completely loses touch with reality. Although on the surface it may seem that he is a white man gone native, Almayer hasn't got a clue what he is dealing with. He is blind to the schemings of his Malay wife and equally oblivious to the fact that his daughter is drifting away from him.

Admittedly, the book has 'orientalist' overtones but, then, Joseph Conrad is both a man of his time and a master of poweful prose, not a politically-correct scholar. The stereotypical mystique of Asia and the inscrutable oriental are exploited as a literary means to descend into the deeper levels of man's psyche. Just like the 'true heart' of Borneo and its inhabitants is hidden under layer upon layer of deceiving images, so is the core of each and every individual. The scariest place to travel is not the interior of an Indonesian Island, but the inner reaches of our own soul.

Almayer's Folly is one of the best novels ever written. Not only because of the author's masterful portrayals of character, but also due his astounding command of English. It is hard to believe that Conrad's first and second language were Polish and French: he only learned English as an adult. It is this combination of psychological understanding and extraordinary use of language that make him into a literary genius.

This was the first book I've read by Nadine Gordimer--and it will also be my last. The story on the dust jacket intrigued me, and although I read the book very quickly I thought it was deeply flawed. Gordimer's clumsy writing style was distracting and seemed contrived. Moreover, I found her attempt at treating the themes of globalization and cross-cultural interaction very stereotypical. The protagonist Julie is a poor little rich girl who is depicted with veiled contempt and condescenion by the author. I couldn't muster up much sympathy for her either. Once Julie and her lover "Abdu" go to his unnamed homeland, the story becomes completely preposterous and it is obvious that Gordimer does not know what she is talking about and does not know much about Middle Eastern culture. By refusing to be specific about Abdu's country, Gordimer engages in orientalism--so I was really surprised to see that Edward Said gave this book a glowing review. For a better treatment of cross cultural issues, I would recommend Half a Life by V.S. Naipaul.

This book is very subtle and beautiful. The carefully detailed explanation of the relationship that grows and changes between Julie and Abdu is exquisite. The interactions of Julie and her family, and then the quietly growing connections Julie makes in Abdu's desert family, the roots she puts down when she had no anchors until then, are described to perfection. The end of the book is inevitable, once you know it. But although I gradually came to accept and understand it, I am left after reading the last few pages with an ache in my chest for all of the characters.

My only complaint is that some of Gordimer's sentences are so tortured and indecipherable I had to read them three times before I could figure them out. Now what's that about? Does she mean for the sentences to be that convoluted? Is this due to bad editing? I know it's not me, as I have read many so-called "difficult" authors: among them Nabokov, Lessing various Russians, Japanese etc. Gordimer is writing in English, my native language, for heaven's sake.

BUT---nevertheless I strongly recommend this atmospheric, evocative, painful novel.

I have just finished this book and, while deeply satisfied with the story, I doubt I can tell you what it is 'about', just to recommend it highly.

There is a lot of irony, coming from Gordimer, especially when describing the aimless, 'politically correct' (to use an expedient term), loosely-formed political/apolitical group the heroine hangs out with at a local cafe, having eschewed, partly, her divorced parents' suburban living style. The first half of the book deals with a kind of undefined life in South Africa now, mixed in ways not possible during apartheid and lacking obvious goals in life. The second half, the protagonist's decision to go back with her Arab lover to his (nameless) country, gives us more glue, more fleshed-out characters, a richly detailed story of the lover's Islamic family in a poor village in this desert country. Reasons why Arabs and others emigrate are made obvious. So is the shallowness of some of these reasons. The aimless 'girl', about 30, slowly changes and finds something she didn't have, or know existed, in her South Africa, comparatively rich in opportunities for her, contrasted with those for her lover. I kept thinking she was Berger's Daughter, from an earlier novel of Gordimer. Both are alienated -- Berger's Daughter by virtue of circumstance -- she has lost her radical, anti-apartheid, prominent parents and, for a long time, she seemed buffeted by social forces and groups of people, had no governing center for herself; Julie in The Pickup (an ironic title itself, which obtains throughout the book) also allows circumstance to push her, has no inner principle to guide her life. In this book the protagonist does move, movingly, to a point of making her own needful, radical decision and it is both inevitable and a satisfying surprise.

Despite its title, this is definitely not an autobiography of Mahfouz. Four things prove this: the narrator has three sons (Mahfouz had two daughters); he is sent to prison (Mahfouz never was); he works for a period outside Cairo (Mahfouz never did); he joins a Sufi order (Mahfouz assured me most emphatically that he never did). This was the last book that Mahfouz wrote. In fact he did not write it; it was put together out of pieces that he had dictated, and it is not clear how far it represents the complete work that he had in mind. I believe it should be regarded as a work of fiction, though it may be a fantasy of a life he would like to have lived. It is nevertheless a moving work, and it helps to enlarge our understanding of the author.

The way he wrote the autobiography is very unique. There is no pretention or any clear chronological order. It is the same way we remember our old days.

The wordings required a deep thought and expanding imagination to really enjoy the books. Sometimes funny, sometimes it is sour.

The only thing that makes the book four stars is due to all echoes at the quarter of the last pages are based on his admired Sheik. Had he ever have his own opinions at the last days of his life?

I read this book as part of a Contemporary World Literature course I took in college, and I thought it was the worst book I have ever read. The book is supposed to be about a white woman in South Africa whose father is in prison because of his anti-apartheid views. The strange thing is I learned NOTHING about South Africa, living conditions for whites and blacks in South Africa, and the effect that apartheid had on people in living in South Africa. This book was written in a hoity-toity, avant garde, stream of conciousness fashion that it was impossible to know what was going on. I found myself counting the number of pages until I finished the book. The author of this book should seriously consider writing a book that is coherent, informs people, and broadens their horizon of knowledge, which this book certainly does NOT do.

Having lived in the Apartheid, Nadine Gordimer knows a big deal about political and historical facts of that period. So don't we. In this book, she uses her knowledge to give us the impression of the power of history, overcoming life of normal people. But neither we leave the book with the feeling of being enriched by a talent psychological insight, nor can we avoid the frustration not to be able to follow her detailed but rambling historical picture.

The main character, Rose, is the daughter of an important anti-apartheid leader. Her childhood, her adolescence and her entire life will turn out to be completely affected by her origins. And that's fine with me, although I don't like the idea we can't change our fate. What I didn't like is that the character Rose's development is dropped little by little through the very long book and mixed up with a quantity of events regarding Apartheid and Rose's father connection with the communist party, which the average reader can't understand. There is no order in their happening and the book is not trying to explain them: they are just mentioned!

So, if you want to know more about Apartheid this is not the right book. Probably an essay would be more useful than this novel. And about Ms. Gordimer's psychological insight and characters living in the Apartheid, I would rather suggest "My Son's Story".

This is not light reading; if you're looking for something to graze over while you sit at the pool, look elsewhere. If, however, you're looking to be challenged, to learn, to have your ideas and opinions broadened, Nadine Gordimer's works, in general, and this book in particular, will fill you to brimming if you will take the time and energy to plumb its depths. Many have written about Apartheid, but Gordimer does so with such depth and gravity and coherence and novelty, it's hard to grasp just how ambitious an undertaking this book really is.

My favorite element is the conceit she employs of the protagonist, Rosa Burger, and her connection, ambivalence to, and ultimate embracing of, being "Burger's Daughter." It's her story, most of all, of coming to terms with her individuality, her own self-determination, her own sense of justice and humanity, and discovery of her deepest beliefs; the luxury she has, as a white woman in her society, of being able to make these psychological, spiritual and physical journies. The arguments of apartheid, communism, social movements and injustices are all deep and involving, but play second fiddle to the real issue of the book, the right of self-determination for all people. Rosa ultimately capitulates to the same fate as did her father, but it is her choice, come upon by examining herself and what she values. You can't help but think that Gordimer is ruminating the odds of whether or not the rest of the populace of her native land will ever get the same chance in their lifetimes.