SOURCE: "Once More into the Burrows: Nadine Gordimer's Later Short Fiction," in The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer, edited by Bruce King, St. Martin's Press, 1993, pp. 228-36.

In the essay below, Lomberg traces Gordimer's changing attitudes towards life and love in her short fiction.

In the introduction to her Selected Stories, Nadine Gordimer suggests that the process of composition is, for her, like burrowing into a warren 'where many burrows lead off into the same darkness but this one may debouch far distant from that'. An instance of that is provided by the development of two stories in A Soldier's Embrace into the novella which is the title story of Something Out There.

One of the stories which provides intimations of the subsequent 'exploration' in Something Out There is 'Oral History'. In that, a chief, trying to protect his village from attack by reporting 'guerrillas' in it, finds...