Nobel Laureates in Search of Identity and Integrity

Through her language and fearless characterisation,

Unsentimental and diagnostic, she reports from the heart of darkness.

scraped away the many layers

same search for an identity, a self-confirmation, and a wish to belong and exist.

For Gordimer, the novel and the short story are instruments to penetrate a society that defends itself against scrutiny, hides in censorship and hypocrisy, refuses to recognise its history, and thus produces a grammar of lies where capitalism, liberalism, and Marxism mean the same thing: an onslaught on the volk.

Her characters live in the shadow of violence, threatened by unpredictable brutality.

It is a Cinderella tale summing up Africa's postcolonial history.

Gordimer took political and literary risks in this brutal fairy-tale

The Search for Identity

Nadine Gordimer's great themes are love and politics.

In July's People, Gordimer portrays a future bloody South African revolution, which happily never took place.