My Son's Story: A Novel
Nadine Gordimer
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 125000375X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
When Will skips school to slip off to a movie theater near Johannesburg, he is shocked to see his father. An ordinary mishap, but his father is no ordinary man. He is a "colored" and revered anti-apartheid hero, and his female companion is a white activist fiercely dedicated to the cause. As Will struggles with confusion and bitterness, My Son's Story unravels the consequences of one man's infidelity as a new South Africa violently emerges from the apartheid.
"Captures with convincing detail the ecstatic rewards and terrifying costs of revolutionary politics...Delineates with unblinking candor the collision of public and private experience that takes place on a daily basis in South Africa...A fiercely intelligent novel -- one of her most powerful yet." ―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Gordimer has taken South Africa's tragedy and laid the truth of it in our laps. The story she tell sis lucid and achingly alive."―The Boston Sunday Globe
"Beautifully felt, both in its anger and its compassion...It is so rich as to make praise superfluous, so vital and disturbing as to send us...back into the world with a heightened sense of what life in it might mean."―USA Today
and die. The place where they confine us. Zoo. Leper colony. Asylum. It's humiliating to take from them, Aila. Let them have it.— Her questions were never objections; they were the practical consequence of acceptance. She did not oppose the move. She was careful to present it to their children as something exciting and desirable. And the children were ready to quit with heart-lessness their friends, their school, the four walls and small yard where they had played. Baby had the teenager's
quality outside the subjectivity of passion and affection. There was passion and affection. They married after a formal engagement—he even bought her a ring with a chip of dia-mond—and were not lovers until they were husband and wife. They never used endearments in public or displayed the behaviour expected of people to prove they are in love with one another, but there was a real body under her clothes, a lovely body with all its features there for him: the dark nipples like grapes in his
if you were the fire engine—I don't know why Dad ever gave in to your nagging for one of these things, honestly, Will.— He hesitated, choosing an apple. —I never asked for it.— There was warning in her big, kohl-smeared eyes as he looked up fully at her, though she quickly laughed: —Oh no, I'll bet you never! Never dreamt of asking! Never entered your curly head, brother of mine!— Jars and cups passed warm from hand to hand, a headline was read out by someone, the mother arranged with the son
pleased to see how she is. She was watching me brushing it one day and she said, how old are you now, Ma? She never remembers! She always thinks I'm younger than I am. So I reminded her. She said, and how much of your life have you spent doing that—so next day we went to the hairdresser and I had it off.— She turned her profile to me as if to let me acknowledge the full effect. I said nothing. —I feel so much lighter.— She was looking at me shyly to see if I would not be glad of that. —And has
moment came and she was brought into court. The father paused, with a gesture at the sun, went back to stand on the verandah. Perhaps he thought his son had dropped off, asleep; face up to the sky, eyes closed. But he was on his feet and leaping over the people on the grass before his father beckoned at the sight of the lawyer twisting his shoulders through the crowd on the verandah. —At last!—application's set for two this afternoon, though. The police agreed to bail but the Prosecutor insists