slyallm's review
5.0
Not sure how this ended up on my bookshelf. I was skeptical of another old white African POV on apartheid (or anything, really), but I grabbed it for plane reading because it was small ... and then it was fantastic. Gordimer makes writing outside herself seem so easy; she moves seamlessly from old to young, man to woman, black to white, close to distant, sometimes multiple times in the same story.
The only one that felt false/forced was (ironically) the title track, about a kid brought back to his home country to spy on leftists. On the flip side, there is another that seems to be, right up until the end, a bland and dispassionate recollection of termite exterminators in an African home. Still thinking about it.
The only one that felt false/forced was (ironically) the title track, about a kid brought back to his home country to spy on leftists. On the flip side, there is another that seems to be, right up until the end, a bland and dispassionate recollection of termite exterminators in an African home. Still thinking about it.
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