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Get A Life
A Novel
by Nadine Gordimer
An ecologist reexamines his life after being diagnosed with cancer in this 14th novel from the South African author.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 208 pages
11/29/2005
$21.00
ISBN: 0374161704
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Daily Telegraph Daniel Swift
A brave story about the fragility and the dangers of intimacy.
Kirkus Reviews
The 1991 Nobel winner's 14th novel is one of her most provocative books: an unsparing analysis of the permutations--and ramifications--of commitment and fidelity, endangerment and survival.
Los Angeles Times Martin Rubin
A tour de force for any writer but surely still more remarkable in an octogenarian. There is no sense of retrospection here: "Get a Life" is, in every sense of the expression, a novel that is truly with it. [11 Dec 2005, p.R3]
Publishers Weekly
A lacerating novel, one in which conflicted professional and domestic lives are played for all their contradictory possibility.
San Francisco Chronicle Heller McAlpin
Gordimer's observations about marriage and South Africa's newly integrated society glitter like flecks of mica in the hard outcrops of her prose. In lieu of the political heat and intensity of earlier novels such as "July's People" or "The House Gun," "Get a Life" offers a cooler, more meditative sheen.
The Guardian Jane Stevenson
Gordimer's style has always been spare, but here it is elliptical to the point, at times, of straining grammar beyond its normal bounds. One of the most bizarre aspects of the book is that it seems not to have been edited or proofread. There are sentences which change direction ungrammatically, adjectives where an adverb is expected--conceivably authorial licence, but at points, looking like simple error.
The Guardian Jane Gardam
This is not Wordsworth... But the message of this dense and deeply serious book is clear. Awe wins over comprehension. Human behaviour will always be conditioned by divine surprise.
Booklist Hazel Rochman
The conservation message is strong--tourism's lure of quick jobs for the poor and desperate; the danger of dams, toll roads, nuclear reactors to the wilderness and all living things. Above all, there is the intimate story of the "untouchable" in your home and in yourself. [1 Sep 2005, p. 6]
Boston Globe Robert Braile
This provocative novel is carried more by the elegance of its ideas than the eloquence of its expression.
Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
In the end, "Get a Life" is more for those who want to think about ideas than for people who love to read.
Washington Post Ward Just
Get a Life succumbs now and then to more ecological detail than seems absolutely necessary in a novel on as short a leash as this one ... That quibble aside, this novel begins superbly and ends wonderfully, and in between there are passages of high intelligence, not without Gordimer's signature asperity.
London Review Of Books Jacqueline Rose
In her latest novel, [Gordimer] communicates once again how much she both wishes, and doesn’t wish, that she could have been something else.
The Independent Carol Birch
The characters are laid before us like specimens on a board, unsubstantial creatures as flat as diagrams in a text book. The prose is alternately a joy and an irritation.
The New Yorker
Gordimer is more concerned with ideas than with character, and her dense syntax saps feeling from even the most dramatic events. Still, she is capable of the lacerating truth.
The Spectator Digby Durrant
Get a Life is a difficult read. Sometimes it's more like translating than reading. Sentences have to be read slowly and re-read equally slowly. It's as if to write a simple sentence is an error of taste or sloppy thinking.
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Siddhartha Deb
This new novel is a minor addition to an impressive body of work produced over the decades, but it cannot be faulted for being blind to the changes of our time.
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
The moral quandaries of the well-fed, well-read Bannermans are, in the end, little different from those in a John Updike novel. Gordimer's cryptic, choppy language both fails to convey their subtlety and suggests a mysterious urgency they simply can't support.
The Independent David Isaacson
As the Bannerman family falls apart, so too does the reader's patience with the author's disregard for characters and audience alike.
The New York Times Book Review Sophie Harrison
By aiming too hard for universality, the particular is lost. Sickness may be a universal human affliction, but that doesn't mean each person's experience of it isn't unique. This novel forgets that.
 The average user rating for this book is 4.2 (out of 10) based on 4 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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