SOURCE: "Presuming in Africa," in The Christian Science Monitor, November 4, 1971, p. 11.

In the following mixed review, Bell examines Gordimefs treatment of South Africa's repressive political and social conditions in Livingstone's Companions.

In a recent review of a new novel by V. S. Naipaul, the Indian-Trinidadian writer, Nadine Gordimer remarked: "I have always believed that a writer writes one book all his life: whether consciously so or not, his work is of a piece."

In her own case this inescapable unity—more evident in some writers than in others, of course—has unfolded through a prolific career, now numbering five novels and five volumes of stories, and it has been shaped with particular insistence by the unique facts of her history. Almost all her attempts to refract the oddities and sameness of human experience through her nervously alert and probing sensibility have been stamped by her own place in...