No Time Like the Present
by Nadine Gordimer
- Percentage of approved critics who have given this book a positive review.
Critic Rating
48%
Critic Reviews: 16
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- User rating from iDreamBooks & iTunes
Reader Rating
73%
Reader Ratings: 40
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Synopsis
A sharply observed new novel about post-apartheid South Africa from the Nobel Prize winnerNadine Gordimer is one of our most telling contemporary writers. With each new work, she attacks—with a clear-eyed fierceness, a lack of sentimentality, and an understanding of the darkest depths of the human soul—her theme: the inextricable link between personal life and political, communal history. Revelation of this, not alone in her homeland South Africa, but the... more
About Nadine Gordimer
- All Critics: 16
- Positive: 9
- Negative: 7
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Denver Post | 29 Apr 2012
The novel seems to have been written in great haste, without correction or revision. Gordimer writes an artless, jargon-ridden, run-on prose, full of political pamphlet language
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Tulsa World | 29 Apr 2012
It sometimes reads like notes taken in haste. Such complexity will put off many readers, who may struggle to get through this novel.
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Newsday | 24 Apr 2012
"No Time Like the Present" is Gordimer's best novel since her first, "The Lying Days," written in 1953.
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Chicago Tribune | 25 Apr 2012
Even the most seasoned students of South African culture might find themselves at sea, so what about the less informed?
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The New York Times | 6 Apr 2012
...very much worth the trip for the sharp and affecting views of human interaction that the novel invites us to contemplate and explore.
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The Star | 5 May 2012
No Time Like the Present is written in grammar-flouting stream-of-consciousness prose that is sometimes only comprehensible when you take a run at it.
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Book Reporter | 27 Apr 2012
NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT is a reminder of what fiction can be: complex, committed and thoroughly absorbing.
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Business Week | 9 Apr 2012
At some point I realized that what had been an intelligent pleasure had turned into a slog.
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The Independent | 16 Mar 2012
...her free-style, high-velocity storytelling delivers a visceral immediacy and intensity that lets us inhabit the minds, and share the views, of her characters with the minimum of novelistic fuss.
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Kirkus Reviews | 5 Mar 2012
Gordimer writes movingly and piercingly about the struggles after the Struggle.
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Pieces Blog | 4 Apr 2012
...the way Gordimer tells this story makes the book an important artifact, perhaps even an important literary artifact, but, for me at least, it didn’t make the book an excellent piece of fiction.
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NPR | 11 Apr 2012
No Time Like the Present is not so much a novel about "selling out" as it is about sanely navigating around the pitfalls of normalcy; about remaining committed without fossilizing into a zealot.
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The Globe and Mail | 22 Jun 2012
Nadine Gordimer continues to write some of the – if not the – most nuanced, attentive and vibrant political novels in English. She forcefully, yet never didactically, reminds...readers of the freedoms and privileges so many of us take for granted.
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The New York Times | 6 Apr 2012
The scenes in which these shifts of allegiance transpire provide a perfect example of what literature can give us that history books cannot.
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The Guardian | 23 Mar 2012
In these scenes, as well as in the visits by the children to their grandfather's lands, the curious dispassion of Gordimer's prose gains power.
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Los Angeles Times | 8 Apr 2012
Artfully done, but can it mask (or compensate for) outbreaks of an abrupt, careless style, a throbbing undercurrent of arrogance evident in her novelistic methodology?
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