SOURCE: "Magician at Work," in Book World—The Washington Post, May 16, 1976, p. L1.

Redman is an American critic. In the following review, he lauds the scope of the stories included in Selected Stories.

Nadine Gordimer is a South African who writes critically about South Africa. This causes her trouble at home, of course, since the South African authorities tend to ban the works of dissidents. Yet Gordimer must consider foreign reviewers almost as irksome as Afrikaner censors. Like Solzhenitsyn, she too often finds herself hailed in England and America as a political rather than a literary figure—a form of praise, however laudatory, that inevitably demeans her art.

It ought to be possible to laud Gordimer's courage and still point out that she writes as well as anyone alive today. Americans most recently tasted her talents in The Conservationist, her sixth novel. The protagonist, a South African industrialist...