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“THE LYING DAYS. bjj Nadine Gordimer. New York: Simon Schuster, $3.95.•'The Lying Days is not a bad novel in spite of an inauspicious beginning. Miss Gordimer unfortunately starts out with an inferior imitation of literary devices borrowed from source's as disparate as Willima Faulkner and The Saturday F.vening Post Her atterr.pt at experimental prose is pretty bad. and this maladroit display of implied symbolism, disjointed reverie and rhetorical questions is both unnecessary and badly disjointed.A few weli-chosen words of the dust jacket would be less painful testimony of the authoi s reading than the borrowed pyrotechnics that char the first fifty or so pages of the novel.But just about that time when even a determined reader, or reviewer. is about to give up. Miss Gordimer begins writing good, honest prose, constructing a satisfactory plot, and developing interesting characters. And at thi* point she stops polluting her descriptions with misplaced modifiers and ridiculous personificationsThe plot concerns the loves and near loves of a .voting girl of college age and respectable middle-class Fnghsh extration. The daughter of a mine official in South Africa, she escapes a routine existence by attending the Univeisitv at Johan-nesbuig. where she adopts the interests supposed by many to be those of all intelligent unriorgradu ate*: social justice, good music and liteiature. and casual loveThe latter comprises the main plot of the novel, and the reader interested in the heroine s unconventional love life and her transition from post-ariolsecence to maturity will enjoy the novel The reader less sympathetic toward this subject will be bored in spite of recurring and often well-done thematic materialIt is trite to speak of novelists ai showing promise, but v r,ordi-mer does show pi unuse When she relt;ists the lurcof literary enaila-tanism and util17.es her skill at characterization on a plot that offers more then “The Lying Days. she might write a very good novel indeed F. A F.HMANN
Newspaper Details
El Paso Herald Post
El Paso, Texas, US
Sat, Oct 10, 1953
Page 3
Full Page
Clipped by
Bruce T.
ZA 05 Nov 2015
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