SOURCE: "Faces of Revolution," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 18, 1994, pp. 3, 10.

In the following review, Eder emphasizes the theme of change, both social and personal, in the South Africa of None to Accompany Me.

There are revolutions—the French, the Chinese, the Russian—that devour the children who made them. More often, perhaps, it is a matter not of being devoured but of being digested. A little ahead of the curve of history, as always, Nadine Gordimer writes of two anti-apartheid fighters from whom victory, like a river rising and jumping its bed, has begun to withdraw and leave stranded.

None to Accompany Me takes place in the blurred and confusing excitement of South Africa in the early 1990s. Nelson Mandela was out of jail and negotiating with the government, the black exiles were returning and change was happening too quickly to be legalized or stopped—or...