|
Published in December 1991, in South Africa(?) 277 Pages, Winner of the Nobel Price in Literature Book report Biography of Nadine Gordimer Nadine Gordimer was born November 20 th (1923) in Springs, South Africa. Springs was a small town outside Johannisburg. Her father, Isidore Gordimer, was a Jewish jeweller who had emigrated from Lithuania, a small country in Europe north of Poland. Her mother, Nan Myers Gordimer, was an Englishwoman. The family was neither intellectual nor prosperous, although their lives were financially comfortable. Merely because she was white, Gordimer led what was considered a privileged childhood and young adulthood in the protected environment which surrounded the white minority.
She married twice and has two children: A daughter from her first marriage and a son from her second marriage. Nadine Gordimer began writing at the age of 9. Her first short story was published at 14. During her 20?s, many of her works appeared in local magazines and in 1951 the highly esteemed New Yorker published the first of many of her stories which have appeared in that well known literary magazine. Although some of her works are non-fiction. she is best known today for her twelve novels and is also widely recognized as one of the greatest short story writers of the century.
She has published fifteen collections of short stories. Few South African writers hold the international reputation that does Nadine Gordimer. In 1991, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Between 1901 and 1997, only nine women have received this prestigious international award.) Summary This novel (?My son?s story?), written by Nadine Gordimer, is a story of a man?s evolution as a political activist and the toll it takes on his family and on him. It is also a picture of a marriage and of an extramarital affair, set against a backdrop of daily life in segregated South Africa, even as the winds of change begin to blow.
An exemplary husband and father, a pillar of rectitude in the black community, Sonny is dismissed from his teaching job after he leads a political protest. On his release from his imprisonment, he becomes a leader in the revolutionary underground; at the same time he is swept into an affair with a white woman, a worker in a human rights organization. The intertwined events that lead to the break-up of Sonny?s family and the tragic end of his high hopes and ideals are partially narrated by his teenage son Will, bitter and cynical over his father?s marital betrayal. The novel is eloquent in its understated prose and anguished understanding of moral complexities in a land were black keep ?rags...
on their persons as a protection against tear-gas as white people carry credit cards.? Tightly focused and controlled, expertly plotted, the narrative is replete with ironies; the tension increases almost invisibly, until the unexpected, jolting denouement. In the end, Will resolves to record ?what it really was to live a life determined by the struggle to be free.? Which is exactly what this book does, honestly and memorably. Taken from: www.Barnes&Noble.
com The characters Will is the son. He?s a part of the narration. He is in our/my age, maybe a little bit older. Often he says he hates his father. But in the end he is in a way dependent on his father. He wants to divide himself from his father, but then it came out that he become more and more like his father.
For example in aspect of relationship with women (in the sexual way). He doesn?t have many friends. He is the favourite of the mother. He knows about the affair between his father and this white woman, but didn?t say a word to his mother. Will does have a sister. She is older than Will and her name is Baby (not a usual name).
She is the favourite of the father, but she also talks a lot with her mother about everything. Definitely when she gets older. She is a beauty like her mother and she got many friends. Baby is more independent than Will and later she move out of the family house into an other country, got married and got a baby. When she was still at home she cut her wrists. So I think she?s physically labile and she?s easy to hurt.
It seemed that she?s easy-going. The mother is a very quite person. Her name is Aila and she?s a middle-aged-woman. She does the homework, she?s educated and she goes to work at a doctor practice. She?s worship to her husband. Aila never said what?s going on in her head and what she wanted.
She also doesn?t have many friends. But after her visits at her daughters? home she changes herself. She cuts her beautiful, long hair and is more outgoing. She says what she thinks, what she wants and gives instructions to her husband and to her son. Aila also goes more outside and ?pretend? to meet friends. At the end the family found out that Aila was also an activist like her husband.
The father/husband is a political activist and a man in the fifties. He was a teacher and was dismissed after he leads a political protest. After Sonny, this is his name, was released, he becomes a leader in the revolutionary underground. At the same time he swept into an affair with a white woman. He is a strong character and before the affair he was the man in the house. But when the affair started, Sonny doesn?t have enough time for his family.
It?s better to say he doesn?t want to be at home with his family. Because he can?t shares his thoughts and feelings, mostly about the movement, with Aila or the other family members. The white woman is a worker in a human rights organization. I think she?s also a middle-aged-woman. She helped Sonny and his family whilst he was in prison. The characters (continuation) The white woman is called Hannah Plowman.
All characters are ?round? characters and there are more than one protagonists. I think the whole family AND the white woman are the protagonists. The main ideas The predominating incidents: · Will did see his father with this white woman · They moved into a neighbourhood among whites · Sonny get into prison · Baby cut her wrists · Sonnys? speech at the grave · Baby moved into another country, married and got a baby · Ailas? trips to her daughter · Aila was put into prison · Ailas? escape into another country and no ?coming home? · Sonnys? trip to his daughter, grandchild & son-in-law · The house was burned down The Theme are the apartheid, how a woman can destroy a family and which hidden things in some people are. Structure The atmosphere is very familiar and serious. There are flashbacks. When the narrator talk about that Sonny & Aila sat on the table in the kitchen.
Sonny was correcting the unseen/seclusion and Aila was educating herself. There are also some climaxes. In my opinion the points under ?The main ideas? are the climaxes. It?s not a frame story. We do see the action through the eyes of Will, the son (that?s why the story called ?My son?s story?) and a all-knowing-narrator. There is no real suspense.
Style Her style of the sentences is quite different. Some sentences are very long which I can?t understand and some are very short. On the other hand are some of these sentences, no matter if they were long or short, quite difficult. The level of speech is also different. If the narrator tells the story it?s good, but also open minded English. If the Son tells the story it?s more ?everyday speech?.
The mode of tone of the whole book is very serious, but also very ironical, bitter and cynical. Excerpt NOTIZEN Nadine Gordimer ? Biography Born in Springs, South Africa, 20/11/1923. Daughter of Isidore and Nan Gordimer. Has lived all her life, and continues to live, in South Africa. Principal works: 10 novels, including A Guest of Honour, The Conservationist, Burger\'s Daughter, July\'s People, A Sport of Nature, My Son\'s Story and her most recent, None to Accompany Me. 10 short story collections, the most recent Jump, published 1991, and Why Haven\'t You Written: Selected Stories 1950-1972, published 1992.
Non-fiction: The Essential Gesture; On the Mines; The Black Interpreters. Among honorary degrees: from Yale, Harvard, Columbia, New School for Social Research, USA; University of Leuven, Belgium, University of York (England), Universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand (South Africa), Cambridge University (England). Commandeur de l\'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France). Vice-President of International PEN. Executive Member, Congress of South African Writers. From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1991-1995, World Scientific Publishing Co.
, Singapore Nadine Gordimer was born November 20, 1923, in Springs, South Africa. Springs was a small mining town outside Johannesburg, the capital of South Africa. Her father, Isidore Gordimer, was a Jewish jeweler who had emigrated from Lithuania, a small country in Europe north of Poland. Her mother, Nan Myers Gordimer, was an Englishwoman. The family was neither intellectual nor prosperous, although their lives were financially comfortable. Merely because she was white, Gordimer led what was considered a privileged childhood and young adulthood in the protected environment which surrounded the white minority.
She married twice and has two children, a daughter from her first marriage and a son from her second (since 1954 to Reinhold Cassirer). Literary Reputation Gordimer began writing at the age of 9; her first short story was published at 14. During her 20?s, many of her works appeared in local magazines, and in 1951 the highly esteemed New Yorker published the first of many of her stories which have appeared in that well known literary magazine. Although some of her works are non-fiction, she is best known today for her twelve novels and is also widely recognized as one of the greatest short story writers of the century. She has published fifteen collections of short stories. Few South African writers hold the international reputation that does Nadine Gordimer.
In 1991, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Between 1901 and 1997, only nine women have received this prestigious international award.) Significant Influences Gordimer?s formal education was limited. She attended private Catholic schools, where she was an indifferent student, and spent only one year at the University of Witwatersrand. She credits books with being the developing force in her life, for they provided her a view of the world her personal life did not reveal. During adulthood she has traveled extensively in Africa, Europe, and North America, but has continued to life in South Africa.
Gordimer chose a non-traditional road to travel. She strongly opposed segregation and was an ardent opponent of apartheid for nearly fifty years before its collapse in 1994. This racial segregation system overwhelmingly favored all people of her race at the heavy expense of all people of other races, especially blacks Pub. Date: December 1991 Publisher: Penguin From the Publisher Playing truant, Will slips off to a movie theatre near Johannesburg and is shocked to see his father there--with a woman he doesn\'t know. The father is a \"colored\" schoolteacher who has become a hero in the struggle against apartheid; his companion is a white activist fiercely dedicated to the cause. From The Critics Laurel Graeber.
..Much of the novel\'s power and interest derive from her almost uncanny ability to portray each of the novel\'s characters with sympathy and subtlety....
\'\'The book is really about the problems the ordinary forms of love bring within a particular context,\'\' said Ms. Gordimer, \'\'in which love of country is inextricably bound up with these other types of love. And by love of country, I don\'t mean gung-ho patriotism, but involvement with the time.\'\' --The New York TimesNew York Times Book ReviewA bold, unnerving tour de force. Publisher\'s WeeklyHighly praised as a literate goad to South Africa\'s conscience under apartheid, Gordimer (A Sport of Nature) here delivers her most perceptive and powerful novel in years. The story of a man\'s evolution as a political activist and the toll it takes on his family and on him, it is also a picture of a marriage and of an extramarital affair, set against a backdrop of daily life in segregated South Africa, even as the winds of change begin to blow.
An exemplary husband and father, a pillar of rectitude in the black community, Sonny is dismissed from his teaching job after he leads a political protest. On his release from his imprisonment, he becomes a leader in the revolutionary underground; at the same time he is swept into an affair with a white woman, a worker in a human rights organization. The intertwined events that lead to the breakup of Sonny\'s family and the tragic end of his high hopes and ideals are partially narrated by his teenage son Will, bitter and cynical over his father\'s marital betrayal. The novel is eloquent in its understated prose and anguished understanding of moral complexities in a land where blacks keep ``rags...
on their persons as protection against tear-gas as white people carry credit cards.\'\' Tightly focused and controlled, expertly plotted, the narrative is replete with ironies; the tension increases almost invisibly, until the unexpected, jolting denouement. In the end, Will resolves to record ``what it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free.\'\' Which is exactly what this book does, honestly and memorably.Library Journal - Ravonne A. Green, Emmanuel College Library, Franklin Springs, GA ? Ravonne A.
Green, Emmanuel College Library, Franklin Springs, GA ? Ravonne A. Green, Emmanuel College Library, Franklin Springs, GA ? Ravonne A. Green, Emmanuel College Library, Franklin Springs, GA ? Ravonne A. Green, Emmanuel College Library, Franklin Springs, GA ? Ravonne A. Green, Emmanuel College Library, Franklin Springs, GA ? Ravonne A. Green, Emmanuel College Library, Franklin Springs, GA Gordimer\'s new novel, about a colored South African family ravaged by the father\'s affair with a white human rights advocate, probes with breathtaking power and precision the complexities of ``love, love/hate,\'\' and the interplay of public and private reality.
First-person narration shows son Will\'s struggle to deal with confusion and bitterness after discovering father Sonny\'s infidelity; alternating third-person sequences depict Sonny\'s evolution from a committed schoolteacher and devoted husband/father into a resistance worker for whom the movement itself ultimately becomes a second family--one his loyal wife Aila cannot share with him, though his lover Hannah does. The book\'s richness of sensation and consciousness is such that Gordimer\'s eloquence is, at times, almost unbearable. Always, though, she retains perfect control over her material, rendering her characters\' shifting perspectives with truly extraordinary empathy and discernment. -- Elise Chase, Forbes Library, Northampton, MassachusettsLibrary JournalGordimer\'s new novel, about a colored South African family ravaged by the father\'s affair with a white human rights advocate, probes with breathtaking power and precision the complexities of ``love, love/hate,\'\' and the interplay of public and private reality. First-person narration shows son Will\'s struggle to deal with confusion and bitterness after discovering father Sonny\'s infidelity; alternating third-person sequences depict Sonny\'s evolution from a committed schoolteacher and devoted husband/father into a resistance worker for whom the movement itself ultimately becomes a second family--one his loyal wife Aila cannot share with him, though his lover Hannah does. The book\'s richness of sensation and consciousness is such that Gordimer\'s eloquence is, at times, almost unbearable.
Always, though, she retains perfect control over her material, rendering her characters\' shifting perspectives with truly extraordinary empathy and discernment. -- Elise Chase, Forbes Library, Northampton, Massachusetts
|
