The Lying Days Lying Days" in 1953 were generally positive. "New York Times" critic James Stern compared the novel favourably to the works of Alan Paton, especially "Cry, the Beloved Country", describing "The Lying Days" as the better of the two novels. Stern described the novel as less "novel" and more "biography", following the style and form of biographical writing. In a review in the "Fitchburg Sentinel", W. G. Rogers wrote that in "The Lying Days" Gordimer shows that South Africa "is a land not of a single problem, race, but of many problems which that one central issue seems to magnify and
Beloved (novel) “never simply curative”: in raising the ghosts of the past in order to banish or memorialize them, the texts potentially “provoke readers to the vicarious experience of trauma and act as a means of transmission". Ann Snitow's reaction to "Beloved" neatly illustrates how Morrison criticism began to evolve and move toward new modes of interpretation. In her 1987 review of "Beloved", Snitow argues that Beloved, the ghost at the center of the narrative, is "too light" and "hollow", rendering the entire novel "airless". Snitow changed her position after reading criticism that interpreted "Beloved" in a different way, seeing something more