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In one of the first pages and crucial scenes of The Lying Days (1953), we soon associate the narrating voice with that of a bright, inquisitive child of Scottish descent immersed in the harsh Witwatersrand scenario of a mining estate outskirts in the 1930s, along a path crammed with Jews’ concession stores and exotic-looking natives. The unruly little girl is Helen Shaw, the late Nadine Gordimer’s fictional double in her still somewhat neglected first novel, a Bildungsroman where the South African writer coming from Springs admirably capitalized on the “camera-eye” perspectives and zooming-in on details which had already informed much of her masterly short fiction. The aim of the present paper is to shed light on Helen’s difficult growth towards sociopolitical and ethical awakening—in a country finding itself more and more trapped in the apartheid grip—by pointing out the earliest, embryonic stages of such a progressive knocking down of epistemic barriers. The author will thus focus on “The Mine”, the first and most concise of the three parts making up the novel, and show how Gordimer’s acute prose, incisive style, and descriptive strategies prove to be a fitting tool for recording and weighing the experience of an indefatigable observer, a hungry mind in search of erased features, meaningful connections, revealing contexts and subjects.

“Eye Caught by Another Eye”: Locating Experience in Nadine Gordimer’s The Lying Days