The Train From Rhodesia by Nadine Gordimer

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The Train From Rhodesia by Nadine Gordimer The story I have decided to study is "The train from Rhodesia" The author of this story is a South African woman named Nadine Gordimer. She was born in Transvaal, just outside Johannesburg, in 1923 and lived there with her Jewish father and her British mother. She received a Nobel Prize for literature in 1991 and her first story was published when she was just fourteen years old. She had only been writing for five years as she started at the age of nine. Nadine Gordimer is admired for her modern writing and became only the eighth woman to win a Nobel Prize in its ninety-year history. She was very critical of how the white European minority controlled the black African people. Some of her writing reflects this and many of her books were banned in her native land. Quotes in the author's description give hints to what the story will involve. "Her writing deals with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country" Because previous stories she has written have had similar themes. This could mean this story could be the same. The story is based around a young married couple that buy lots of souvenirs on holiday in Rhodesia. A train arrives at a small station. The young woman asks a beggar to show her a lion that he carved himself. She takes a look at it, but doesn't buy it, as it is too expensive. As the train slowly leaves, the beggar drops his price from three-and-six to one-and-six. The young man brought it and gave it to his wife. She wasn't happy and wanted him to take it back because the beggar deserved more for it, if you look and read more into the story, this could come across to the young woman that the young man doesn't think she deserves something so expensive. The structure of this story is simple as it is all in chronological order, but sometimes the story gives hints of things that happened in

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