A Guest of Honour (novel)

First edition (publ. Viking Press)

A Guest of Honour is a 1970 novel by Nobel winning South African writer Nadine Gordimer. Published four years after her novel The Late Bourgeois World, the novel is a political novel that explores the role of revolutionary ideas in new African states.^[1]

Critical reception

The New York Times reviewer Thomas Fisk called the novel "a long, spacious, comprehensive work of fiction" which has "something Olympian, something magnificently confident [about how] this South African writer goes about her work."^[1] Fisk's review focuses on the stylistic qualities of the novel, calling the characters "exceedingly human: complicated, erring, driven by fleshy appetites and by the loftiest resolves" and discussing the setting as a "landscape s tactile and so sensuous that it becomes a participant in everything that occurs".^[1]

References

Further reading

• Fido, Elaine (1978-04-01). "A guest of honour: A feminine view of masculinity". World Literature Written in English. 17 (1): 30–37. ISSN 0093-1705. doi:10.1080/17449857808588500. 
• Donge, Jan Kees van (1982-10-01). "Nadine Gordimer's "A Guest of Honour": A Failure to Understand Zambian Society". Journal of Southern African Studies. 9 (1): 74–92. JSTOR 2636733. 
• Ogede, Ode S. (2006-01-01). "The Liberal Tradition in South African Literature: Still a Curse? Nadine Gordimer's A Guest of Honour Revisited". International Fiction Review. 33 (1). ISSN 1911-186X.