Nadine Gordimer, 1923-2014

Spectator reviewers over the years have had a difficult time with Nadine Gordimer’s books. Gordimer (1923 – 2014), who won the Nobel Prize for literature and was one of the leading campaigners against apartheid, has died at the age of 90. Her books are passionately political and sometimes maddeningly abstract; some found them poetic, others were infuriated. Livingstone’s Companions in 1972 was a great book, Douglas Dunn wrote at the time.

‘There is so much intelligence being brought to bear in her work that revulsion or criticism is never pious or direct but almost invisibly balanced by ironies, by the natural moral of fiction itself. Indignation is constantly being toned down by sympathy for the general human condition. She is always more interested in people and what makes them happy and unhappy than in political moralities, although the political concern is there… the language is scrupulous and poetic, a poetry of actuality, not of the fabulous.