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Born in 1923 to Jewsih immigrant parents in the South African mining town of Springs, Nadine Gordimer began writing early, from the beginning taking the pathologies and everyday realities of a radically divided society as her subject. She still lives in South Africa, in Johannesburg. Her decision to remain in the country through the years of political repression has reflected her commitment to her subject, to the society to which she feels she belongs, and to her vision of a postapartheid future. Gordimer has drawn criticism both for her apparent lack of attention to feminism in favor of race issues and for the wholeness and unfashionable completeness of her novels--their plottedness, meticulous scene painting, fully realized characters. However, the searching symbolism and complexity of her narratives generally work against such judgments. A prominent feature of her writing is to give a number of different perspectives on a situation, in some cases most poignantly those of apartheid's supporters, and in this way to represent the broader anatomy of a diseased potitics. Gordimer's subject, as she emphasozes, is much more than apartheid; it is the human being in history. In the story Good Climate, Freindly Inhabitants, the narrator plays many important roles in the story. The narrator is 49 trying to look 25.
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