SOURCE: "Troubled Souls," in The New York Times Book Review, October 7, 1956, pp. 7, 34.

Stern is an Irish novelist, short story writer, translator, and critic. In the following review, he offers a positive assessment of Gordimer's Six Feet of the Country.

In this her second collection of stories [Six Feet of the Country] (eight of the fifteen have appeared in The New Yorker) Nadine Gordimer's range is far wider, the observation even keener, than that shown in her volume The Soft Voice of the Serpent. The quality of the prose, the authority and intelligence behind it, are surely unsurpassed by any other writer in South Africa today. What Miss Gordimer's admirers may miss here, however, is the abiding compassion of her novel, The Lying Days.

In Six Feet of the Country the author's primary concerns seem to be twofold: the behavior—usually malicious, occasionally shocking—of highly sophisticated white South...