Her acute awareness of what she calls “shameful enormity of color bar,” marks most of her writing. Agreeing with Franz Kafka that “literature must be an axe to break up the frozen sea within us”, she aspired to use her writings to serve the social cause of exposing the inhumanness of apartheid. Her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), was slightly indicative of her growing political awareness; it is a kind of bildungsroman—a novel of ideas— interspersed with a love story. Her fiction is a seamless intermingling of the personal and the social and the political. It was not possible to evade the latter for a writer living in the conflicting social setup in South Africa. The savage atrocities against the other are not limited to blacks alone. In July’s People, the author presents the plight of white people who are hunted and even murdered by blacks in their attack against them. Maureen and Bamford Smales seek asylum with July, their former servant, fearing attack by blacks. Conservationist, her novel which won the Man Booker Prize in 1976, presents Mehring, a wealthy white industrialist, who seeks to conserve nature by preserving apartheid. The life in South Africa, described in the novel, recalls the life presented by J M Coetzee in In the Heart of My Country. In Burger’s Daughter, Nadine presents the participation of Rosa Burger, the daughter of a charismatic doctor, who was murdered, in political struggle, despite her initial reluctance. Even in her last novel, Nothing Like the Present, she deals with political issues like the problems faced by the new democracy in South Africa under the rule by African National Congress, a party which she supported early on, but turned a vehement critic of corruption under President Jacob Zuma. Her novels reveal her intimate immediacy about the extremely confusing personal and social relationships in South African environment.
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