My Son's Story: A Novel - Hardcover

Gordimer, Nadine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374217513 ISBN 13: 9780374217518

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990

Synopsis

Will, the narrator of this powerfully charged novel, discovers that his father, a political activist and local hero in their South African town, has become involved with a white woman. Wrenching, passionate, deeply resonant, My Son's Story evokes the inexorable yoking of the personal life and politics with uniquely moving force.

About this title

Reviews

Highly 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. Imprisoned, on his release 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.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/90.
- Elise Chase, Forbes Lib., Northampton, Mass.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

My Son's Story

You had a Father, let your son say so.

 

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Sonnet 13

Copyright © 1990 by Felix Licensing BV All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374217513
• ISBN 13: 9780374217518
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 278