Volume 45, Number 8 · May 14, 1998

A Murder in South Africa

By Neal Ascherson
The House Gun
by Nadine Gordimer

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 294 pp., $24.00

Two quotations seem to carry the main architectural load of Nadine Gordimer's new book, whose design is strange and not entirely that of a work of fiction. One is from Dostoevsky. It is the voice of the satanic Rogozhin in The Idiot, speaking of doomed and rebellious Nastasya Filippovna: 'She would have drowned herself long ago if she had not had me; that's the truth. She doesn't do that because, perhaps, I am more dreadful than the water.'



Review, 2148 words

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