The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer's first novel, published in 1953, tells the story of Helen Shaw, daughter of white middle-class parents in a small gold-mining town in South Africa. As Helen comes of age, so does her awareness grow of the African life around her. Her involvement, as a bohemian student, with young blacks leads her into complex relationships of emotion and action in a culture of dissension.

Genres: Fiction, South Africa, Africa, Novels, Historical Fiction

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer, political activist, and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was recognized as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity".

Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger's Daughter and July's People were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organization was banned. She was also active in HIV/AIDS causes.

Reviews

[Cherisa B · Rating 4 out of 5]

A white girl, Helen Shaw, coming of age in middle class European society in South Africa in the late 1940s outside Johannesburg. Her eyes open to differences between many things, social classes, intellectual outlook, life choices, and yes, skin color and the racism of the world she inhabits. Her story shows how people can hide themselves away from the injustices and systemic racism of a policy as egregious as apartheid. Just being formulated formally by the newly elected Nationalist government, many of the practices were already in place. How some try to ameliorate it - Helen’s lover Paul works to house Africans in a “location” of 1100 “homes” with thousands of more families than that.

The people among whom Paul worked were not the normal human wastage for a big industrial city, but a whole population, the entire black-skinned population on whose labour the city rested, forced to live in slums because there was no where else for them to live, too poor to maintain themselves decently because no matter what their energy level, their skill, their labour was not allowed value above subsistence level.

Her friend Joel talks about the obstacles of the blacks just trying to get an education have: “Look, if you’re a native,” Joel was saying, “you have to be exceptional to do ordinary things. You have to be one of four in ten who go to school at all, in the first place. You have to be able to concentrate on an empty stomach because you haven’t had any breakfast, you have to resist the temptation to nip off and do a bit of caddying for pocket money you never get given to you, you have to persuade your parents, who can’t afford to keep you, to go on keeping you after you’re twelve or thirteen and could be a houseboy or a nanny and keep yourself. And that’s only the beginning. That’s what you’ve got to do to get the the point at which white kids only start off making an effort. Just to get through ordinary schooling you’ve got to be a very exceptional kid. And from then on you’ve got to be more and more exceptional, although in your school life you’ve used up enough determination and effort to put a white boy right through qualification in a profession. That’s how it is.” He sat back, looking at us.


Helen’s story gives some history about a bifurcated society that has disenfranchised its majority, turned them into The Other to be kept down and away. Paints a contrasting picture of privilege and freedom for the white minority to choose a lifestyle, ability to travel, work or not work.

Beautifully written. Quite moving. An early work by a Nobel laureate.

[Bob Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Coming of Age in South Africa

Even when she was in her twenties, Nadine Gordimer could write magnificent prose. Like John Updike, she could describe feelings, intimate details, rooms, and scenes perfectly, immaculately, with unrivaled accuracy. It is not just a page here or a page there, but from start to finish. If brilliant, it’s almost exhausting. THE LYING YEARS describes the life of a young woman born into a gold mine town with its narrow vision, parochial tastes, and the usual unseen assumptions of small towns that your future will exactly replicate your parents' life. [It was her first novel and probably quite autobiographical.] Given that it’s South Africa in the 1940s and early ‘50s, a ferocious dollop of automatic racism is added to the mix. Africans have no place in white lives except as servants. They are deprived of nearly everything, but the whites accept that as normal. The English speaking whites automatically assume the top position, over the Afrikaaners, Jews, Indians, colored (mixed race), and Africans. The novel traces the development of adulthood in Helen Shaw as well as the realization that this racial hierarchy and the close-to-fascist government were abhorrent. Breaking with her parents, she goes to Johannesburg to mix with the beatnik-ish set of non-conforming young rebels who, like such people everywhere, eventually lapse into impotent middle class life while still proclaiming their separateness. They cannot make a difference in the apartheid structure of South Africa. Combined with political or social observations are her romantic/sexual awakenings and the changes in her goals and views of life. It’s slow and realistic, making you feel that you too once knew that South African ambience. If you want a book with a strong plot, however, better skip this one. If you ever read Italo Svevo’s “Confessions of Zeno” and liked it, you might like TLD, though even the former contains more events. As Gordimer eventually won the Nobel Prize, she must have sharpened her already-impressive skills, but at times I felt I was wading through a very literate swamp. As a portrait of a young woman’s coming of age in South Africa and in this world in general, it probably cannot be beaten. So, it’s up to you to decide what is important.

And a confession: I’m still not sure why she gave it such a title. Were they all lying about the nature of the society? Was she lying to herself about her attractions to different men? Was everybody lying down in the face of brutal repression? Because she lied to her parents about her life in the city or her feeling that their society was evil? I could not decide.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.75/5 Stars

I had to read this novel for class and I must say I expected more from it. This book is centered around Helen Shaw and tells her coming of age story in the South Africa of the 1940s. Even though I appreciated some of Helen's behaviors, especially when she tried to find a life of her own out of her parents' grasp, I also found her quite boring and a bit hypocritical at times.
The book shows the unrest of those years and also talks about segregation, but even though I feel like these themes were always on the page (sometimes in the background, but the feel of them was always there), I also feel like they weren't developed enough. We saw them only through Helen's perspective and I wasn't the biggest fan of that.

[Keryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite writing by the great Ms Gordimer; I could not put this down, even though some have said in reviews that it is slow-moving and boring.

As a South African, I find this story fascinating as it is set during the time when my parents were children (having emigrated from England as toddlers with their parents) and the country was on a tragic path in our history. Descriptions of the city of Johannesburg and Durban, especially the port area, are amazing:

"The old airport on the Snell parade was still in use then, and the taxi that took me to my hotel passed smoothly between the green of the airport with its fringe of umbrella trees on one side and the sea deep green behind a low bank of bush on the other...the plan of Durban is very simple and sensible: the visitors live in a long strip of hotels, spread for more than a mile along the beachfront; the town lies immediately behind that, on either side of West Street which lifts up from the sea; the residents live behind that, up in the hills..."

I expected more overt racial violence in the book but instead the story portrays the hidden nature of the suffering so effectively through a coming-of-age romantic human drama, as well as the slow awakening of the young Helen to the injustices around her, being born into the privileged white society of the local mine. The simplicity of this awakening of a young adult is almost more shocking in its understated nature, than if the message were reported by a more mature narrator:

"We were all like sleepers, coming awake from a long lull of acceptance. I know that I, who for all my childhood had lived surrounded by natives who simply attended our lives in one function of another...found with real consciousness of strangeness and wonderment that I was beginning to think of them as individually human."

Well worth the read, and recommended for a possible English set work in high school Grade 11...

[Martina · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

I had to read this novel by Nadine Gordimer for class and I have to admit I wan't expecting to like it as much as I did. I think it was a bit too slow for my taste, but I like the story nevertheless. I also appreciated a lot of dialogues and insights here provided.

[Baran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite book.

Stunning writing that exemplifies the the highest form of the craft. The author is able to create an immediate, real and profoundly complete inner life. The character of Helen is someone who I felt like I have not only met, but have the privilege of sharing her conscious.

The way the novel examines the human's ability to peel away the onion layers of one's soul, each truer then the next, is a lesson in humility and the inspiration for deep and continued personal development.

Wonderful art!

[Margaret Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set against the backdrop of segregationist South Africa of the'30's and '40's,and narrated in the 1st person by the young woman protagonist, Helen,of white middle class colonial background- who grows up 'on the crust'-not the actual soil- of the country, this book conveys a visceral sense of the profound unrest in South Africa. It is an intensely-wrought story with astute and universally recognizable insights. Gordimer writes like an analytic philosopher-poet.Her breadth of vision is huge.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some books live unread on our shelves for an inexplicably long time, so that when eventually we pick them up, we wonder what on earth took us so long. That is certainly the case with The Lying Days, both this novel and Nadine Gordimer’s Booker winning The Conservationist have been residing on my to be read shelves for several years. I am very glad though that I started with this one, because it was, as I soon discovered, Gordimer’s first novel. As a first novel it is extraordinary – there is a slow, dreamlike quality to much of the narrative, sections where little happens, and in that perhaps we see the inexperience of a first time novelist. There is however, still so much to admire in this, South African novel of a young woman’s political and emotional emergence into a complex, divided society.

“Statutes and laws and pronouncements may pass over the heads of the people whom they concern, but shame does not need the medium of literacy. Humiliation goes dumbly home – a dog, a child too small to speak can sense it – and it sank right down through all the arid layers of African life in the city and entered the blood even of those who could not understand why they felt and acted as they did, or even knew that they felt or acted.”

Our narrator is Helen Shaw who grows up in the white community that surrounds the Atherton gold mine where her father is secretary. Here within a fairly privileged, sheltered white world – Helen is an only child, cossetted by a mother’s who has never sought to question anything around her. The family have a large, comfortable house, a black servant, Anna looks after the domestic tasks, but she lives outside the house in a small dwelling behind the main house. The family and the other white people associated with the mine, socialise only with one another. Meanwhile the black mine workers have little impact upon the lives of these white people whose very world is designed to come into contact with them as little as possible. For the first seventeen years of her life, this is the only world that Helen knows. Then, Helen is allowed to go and spend the summer with Mrs Koch a family friend on the coast. Here Helen meets Ludi, a soldier on leave, Mrs Koch’s son, is a lot older than Helen, sensual and a little unconventional, he begins to show Helen that there is another world than the one she grew up in.

Full review https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2015/...

[G · Rating 5 out of 5]

Technically 4.5 because the centering of the white experience/white cognizance of racism feels extremely dated (that said, it's set in the 1940s to 1950 in Joburg and the protagonist is a naive young white woman, the daughter of mine higher-ups). But I loved it so much that it blew past star ratings for me. Gordimer is the most profoundly sensual writer. Her prose is so dense because she's conveying so much. When she gets done describing a place, you can see it, feel it; you've experienced it in every detail along with her characters. It's also a category-breaking -- for me -- depiction of a young woman coming of age; Gordimer writes about Helen's burgeoning awareness of her sexuality so well, and really captures the way sexuality and sexual expression differs entirely from emotional experience (but how conservative cultures ignore that delineation, trapping endless numbers of people in terrible dead-end relationships).

Honestly I can't speak highly enough of this book. If you loved Ferrante, this is that, with better, harder prose. I'm going to buy a copy ASAP so I can read it again.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent, beautiful novel. This book is as much about South Africa and the roots of Apartheid as it as a fantastic girl coming of age story. I'll take this over Catcher In the Rye any day. I highly recommend!

[Melanie H · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the beginning of this book was slow-moving (as many reviews indicate), I eventually got into the story and connected with the main character. As an American with limited knowledge of South Africa, it was a learning experience.

[José Toledo · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is amazing because it shows a great writer at her beginnings, a woman in her twenties displaying a rare ability to communicate emotion with the coolness of a antipodean Virginia Woolf. The hallmark of a true artist showed early.

[Tracy Guth Spangler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such beautiful writing. Written in the 1950s, a sort of coming-of-age story of a white South African girl, waking up to the realities of her country and her class. Really liked it.

[Athena · Rating 2 out of 5]

too boring...did not hold my attention

[Lessidisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

J'aime beaucoup le style propre à Nadine Gordimer, très délicat, mais dans son premier roman j'imagine qu'elle a voulu insérer le maximum des idées qu'elle avait, ce qui rend le tout indigeste. Plus le fait qu'il y ait beaucoup trop de mots par pages, la lecture stagne. Ce livre on n'en vient jamais à bout, c'est éreintant.

Le livre se déroule au milieu du 20e siècle. On entre chez la bourgeoisie blanche sud-africaine, en la personne d'une jeune fille nommée Helen, on suit principalement ses relations amoureuses pendant quelques années. Elle rejoint une bande de jeunes de gauche qui trouvent anormal que les noirs soient payés des salaires qui ne leurs permettent pas d'accéder à des logements décents. Cependant ce sont deux peuples qui vivent juxtaposés mais se côtoient peu. Comme elle le dit elle-même, elle ne parle aucune de leurs langues, ne comprend pas ce qu'ils disent quand elle circule dans les lieux publics, et est donc comme coupée de la moitié de la population dans son pays. L'apartheid n'est ainsi qu'un thème de fond dans le livre.

Le style est donc toujours intéressant avec Nadine Gordimer, ici le propos n'est pas spécialement accrocheur, et le livre beaucoup trop long.

She stood there looking at me quietly, half as if she expected a challenge of her right to be there, for the University was the one place in all Johannnesburg and one of the few places in all South Africa where a black girl could wash her hands in the same place as a white girl, and this fact took some getting used to for both the Africans students and the white.

[...] Jenny in an unexpected splendor. My imagination was captured. I saw a bright, half-bare room, the books all round, a charcoal drawing tacked on the wall, a pineapple on a wooden dish and the girl with her bare breasts over the baby. Something of it remains with me to this day, in spite of everything.

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It always amazes me to notice the disproportion of feeling to actions which human beings show in their lives. In theory, there is an abstract value put on events which has little basis in reality. It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women--a new job, a new town, a divorce--which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; somethin g by which they may be so taken up that the practical outward changes of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves. This gives a shifting quality to the whole surface of life; decisions made with reason and the tongue may never be made valid by the heart--a woman may continue to love her husband when all her friends agree she was perfectly right to rid herself of such a worthless creature. Ald is also gives rise to those small mysteries which affront us when what we consider the appropriate emotions failt to appear in people: his friends are shocked by the passive acceptance of his wife's death by a man who cannot explain, for he scarcely knows it himself, that her presence has been dead to him for several year." - p. .244


"People only rise to the surface of their lives when there is to be change, a threat. You only say: I'm alive, when you see death. You only say: I'm here, when you're about to go. But I could not calm the trembling that astonished me all through my body; I felt for a moment that my whole consciousness resting, since I was born, on one side, had suddenly turned over, like a great stone on the bed of the sea, and shown an unknown world, a shining unseen surface, different, different utterly, alive with waving weeds and startled creatures pulsating on the coral." - p. 364

[Francisco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Our appreciation of a book is greately subjective and sometimes it is difficult to put in words what one feels. Also the appreciation is influenced by the time at which you read it. It involves emotions, historical events, moods, etc. It could change, but in this very moment, I would say that this is the best novel I have ever read. It is so subtle, so well writen so poignant that, in spite of not being a tragedy, I shed tears when I finished reading it. The way Ms Gordimer describes motions and, more importantly, the evolution of those emotions is truly remarkable. The pace itis writen is just right as one reads the complex thinking o the main character. The setting in racist South Africa allows for the exploration of the darkest aspects of human nature and the book handles it beautifuly and shockingly. The individual rite of passage of the main character is so insightful, so well written that at times I had to stop to marvel and gather my composure. Amazing!

[Julie Oxendale · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am slowly savouring the novels of Nadine Gordimer. I started this one almost two years ago in a different country and had to return it to the library. Now I'm revisiting the country I went back to the library and once again slowly made my way through this exploration of a young girl's sensations and experiences as she makes her way from a sheltered, conventional mining community to the aspirant bohemian, liberated and liberal life in Joburg. I was moved by the descriptions of the obsessive nature of awakening lust and love. I empathised with the young woman choosing to live with a man she knew she'd never marry incurring her parents wrath. And most of all the ending affected me viscerally. Being able finally to 'connect' with a man who'd watched her since childhood; that section I will re-read. I was captivated.

[Helena · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first I did not like this book, it seemed to not know what it was trying to accomplish. I realised quickly that I was wrong, and that the characters had more purpose and clarity than I have ever read before. The ability to articulate private moments of human experience which I had never considered could even be expressed in word form was incredible. I am not surprised she has earned a nobel prize in literature - words do exactly as she wants them to.
I am torn between wanting to reread it, and knowing the impact it has had is specific to right now, and is not reproducible.

[Alyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

Loved it

[Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

So well-written, so indulgent.

[Dave Williams]

😒

[Madhuri]

Coming of age with disillusion

There is nothing novel about coming of age stories - and yet this one seems different. Of course a lot of it has to do with the way Gordimer writes those sentences - as if she is going through painful but eloquent labour - drawing out one idea at a time. She seems to be discovering them at the same time she writes them.
But the attraction of the book is also where the growing up is placed - in a torn nation where the protagonist is sitting on a comfortable chair. She feels for the people standing below, and semi heartedly makes a case for equality. But she is also not ready to give up her chair, and the guilt of this inaction nags at her. In the end, she acknowledges that she can't run from the tragedy of her nation, and will be part of it, even if with disillusion.

[JULIE · Rating 1 out of 5]

Actually, I couldn't even finish reading this book. Her writing is beautiful and she draws lovely pictures with words. But the fact is I don't visualize all that well, so for me the storyline was continually interrupted. I finally just gave up. Too bad, because I used to really enjoy reading her short stories in The Atlantic Monthly, and I was looking forward to a young girl's coming of age story in South Africa after reading The Power of One. Who knows? I may pick it up again when I have time to just sit and read.

[Megan Doney · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was fascinating to read this, knowing it was her first work. I think she deftly illustrated the gradual disintegration that some (but not all) white people in South Africa experience as they started to see, and question, the apartheid state. Some other readers have criticized the slow pace of the book, but I think for many of us, that kind of realization comes slowly and incrementally. We don't see it all at once--the "What is water?" phenomenon, I imagine.

[Shelby · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Lying Days to me was a very decent novel. Nadine Gordimer really did a good job at explaining the struggles that the main character Helen went through, and I really got a feel of what she was going through. Even though I enjoyed the novel there were parts in the book that did not really capture my attention and made me lose interest. Overall, I enjoyed the novel.

[Jenny Stratton]

I've just fished my copy of this from the loft. Mine was published by Virago. When they started in the 70s I can remember being attracted by their books on bookstore shelved, but can't remember which I read. This one is published in 1983, so I must have bought it then. A later phase in my life, I wonder what attracted me to it. I don't think I read it! I will now.

[Maggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would give it 3.5 stars. It was a very densely written book with descriptions to plod through like wading through thick muddy water. The rambling sentences had to be broken down piece by piece to decipher. But it felt worth it in the end. It was an enlightened coming of age story of a privileged girl during Apartheid in Johannesburg.

[Lyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Her first novel - written in the 1950s. Continuing my life long love affair with this lyrical South African writer who has written all our days for us. From her short story "Treasures of the Sea" that I read while at high school on, she has never failed to move me.