Although
Gordimer declared in interviews that she was not a
Nadine
Gordimer's fiction is generally seen as presenting readers with white women who are not able to reconcile the traumas implicated by their biological whiteness in a land in which acting against the government's system is a difficult alternative to espouse.
A fearless campaigner herself,
Gordimer, who died this week aged 90, joined the anti-apartheid movement in 1960.
Gordimer did not originally choose apartheid as her subject as a young writer, she said, but she found it impossible to dig deeply into South African life without striking repression.
Gordimer, who had more than 30 books to her credit, had jointly claimed Booker Prize in 1974 for 'The Conservationist' and was honored with the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991, where the committee had mentioned her work "magnificent epic writing" which had been of "great benefit to humanity."
Gordimer, who won the literature prize in 1991, three years before the end of white minority rule, died peacefully in her sleep at her home in Johannesburg on Sunday, the family said in a statement.
What happens to the logic of the family when racial "otherness" is turned upside down, as in
Gordimer's My Son's Story?
Gordimer combated apartheid, fought for AIDS victims, and wrote fourteen novels (and many more essays and short stories).