The setup is intriguing: a former black servant has taken his former white masters in his custody after an uprising. The book deals, as might be expected, with their inverted relations, but surprisingly doesn't mention the outside world at all, and all the "action" takes place in the small native community.

The book touches very deep themes of human relations, power over others, and the uncertainty of "an intermediate state". July's motives are never revealed, so you feel a bit uneasy throughout it.

This book was unbelievably difficult to read. I've read philosophy textbooks which open up more easily. Nearly every sentence catches the reader off guard with its structure and is loaded with meanings. Many of the metaphores are a bit hard to digest, and sometimes it doesn't seem worth the effort to figure it out.

Anyway, it made me think, challenged and rewarded me at times, so I'm glad I read it, but I wouldn't be handing out Nobel prizes for this kind of literature. ( )

This short, ambiguous and intensely claustrophobic novel, written at the height of apartheid, imagines a revolution where Black people throughout South Africa are rising up, reclaiming their country and murdering any white people they find. The white liberal middle-class couple Maureen and Bam have been relatively respectful and supportive of their black Servant, July, over many years, and so he agrees to shelter them in his rural village while the worst of the violence ensues outside. The novel centres on how this white family barely acclimatises to this relatively primitive life, how they interact with the black community around them, and their ongoing relationship with July, who now is in effect the master of their domain. The style, mainly told through the eyes of Maureen and Bam, is stilted, with half-sentences, unexpected changes of subject, at times almost hallucinatory physical detail, yet only a sparse smattering of inner thoughts. The world and everyone in it seems to be subjected to a conceptual fog. As the novel progresses, Maureen and Bam increasingly, unwittingly, lose their former civilised possessions and symbols of power, as step by step they are reduced to the black people they are living with, and July's attitude towards them shifts towards defiance and indifference. They stumble through basic survival as if in dementia - they have no idea who steals their prized white possessions or how, they only hear transitory snippets of the state of the world and the revolution outside, and even their memories of their past relations with July at times seems hopelessly flawed. The only clarity for the reader to emerge occurs during the dialogue, which is blisteringly accurate, particularly between Maureen and Bam, but even here most chats are littered with failures to understood each other's thoughts. Sometimes this is simply because of the problems with language, but one suspects it also reflects that no one understands themselves or their motives, let alone anyone else's . So these spoken sentences are meagre oases in a novel which gains considerable power from its vagueness, ambiguity and seeming lack of direction. It is almost impossible for us to place on a firm footing any of the relationships between the major characters, particularly of that between July and Maureen, which at times could be defined as Master and Slave, at others is the reverse of this, and still at other moments feels like two lovers or even an old married couple. It is equally difficult to understand why July looks after this white family. Such profound ambiguities of relationships run through this central artery of the novel and pervade every inch of its flesh. They also make it an absolutely fascinating and rich read, and one that probably demands a second reading immediately after the first. ( )

South Africa becomes a battleground. Armed militants are fighting in all of the cities. The Smales, a liberal white family, escape with the aid of their servant and hide out in his village. That’s where the real battle of this book begins. The roles of ‘servant’ and ‘master’ slowly transform. Tension builds within the Smales as a shift in characters shimmers like the heat rising above the veldt. What surprised me the most was the change in the children.

Gordimer’s writing style took a little effort on my part to get through. I found it to be a bit ‘Faulknerish’. But like reading a Faulkner, the effort was well worth it. The tension within July’s People weighed heavier than the actual book… it was like holding lead. The conflict was not the battle in the cities but the battle within. ( )

July's People is the second book I have read in as many weeks set in apartheid-era South Africa (J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K being the other), and it offers an enlightening insight into a period I know factually but not emotionally.

The Smales, a white middle-class family living in a big city in South Africa, have a black servant whom they call July (because they cannot pronounce his real name). After the black citizens of South Africa stage an uprising, July takes the Smales family to his village to shelter them.

Through this reversal of situations, Gordimer offers a meditation on the nature of power, and how changes in power can be disorienting, whatever the actor's intentions. Prior to the hostilities, the Smales family consider themselves "liberal," and they treat July to small treats and favors that many of their contemporaries do not afford their black servants. Once the situation is reversed, July's treatment of the Smales echoes their treatment of them, and for the Smales--and in particular, the mother, Maureen--this reversal leaves them with an inability to judge the true nature of things.

Neither July nor the Smales act with any apparent malice, and if they are not without prejudice, they all consciously act to avoid displays of it. Gordimer's ultimate point seems to be that outlook doesn't matter; power affects relationships, regardless of a person's intentions or desires otherwise.

In short, July's People is enlightening on both a historical and a thematic level, and I intend to explore more of Gordimer's work in the near future. ( )

This book was so idiosyncratic yet so relevant to all of us - what is it that we value in our lives? Just exactly how important is the 'trivia' in our lives? What will you take when the time comes to flee your home? In common with the woman in this novel I too would probably take a book. Poor Maureen, she was frightened to make a start on hers as 'she did not want to begin it. What would happen when she had read it? There was no other.' Reading on a few lines we find she has indeed made a start but Gordimer allows her to express the very reason we sometimes read and yet for Maureen it was the grim truth.

'But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being in another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading. for her, was not possible. She was in another time. place and consciousness; it pressed in upon her as someone's breath fills a balloon shape. She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete with what she was finding what she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination. They had nothing.'

So this book, written in 1981 set in South Africa is one in which apartheid and the revoltionary uprising of blacks is the backcloth for an adventure that has the white family and black servant role reversed - but in the hands of Nadine Gordimer it is so much more. ( )