Reviews for The AWA Collection

The average rating for The AWA Collection based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-04-18 00:00:00 D G Not sure how this ended up on my bookshelf. I was skeptical of another old white African POV on apartheid (or anything, really), but I grabbed it for plane reading because it was small ... and then it was fantastic. Gordimer makes writing outside herself seem so easy; she moves seamlessly from old to young, man to woman, black to white, close to distant, sometimes multiple times in the same story. The only one that felt false/forced was (ironically) the title track, about a kid brought back to his home country to spy on leftists. On the flip side, there is another that seems to be, right up until the end, a bland and dispassionate recollection of termite exterminators in an African home. Still thinking about it.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-07-16 00:00:00 Peter Almond There are quite a few wonderful stories in this slim volume (the story of the farmer's son & his relationship with the farm worker's daughter was particularly powerful). But it also contains a number of stories that didn't speak to me at all. This is my first experience of Nadine Gordimer's writing, and I've come away with a middling verdict.