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    My Son's Story
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    My Son's Story
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    My Son's Story
    Ebook319 pages5 hours

    My Son's Story

    By Nadine Gordimer

    4.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

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    About this ebook

    A schoolboy playing truant bumps into his revered father coming out of the cinema with a woman. An ordinary mishap; but the father is no ordinary man, and the family, threatened by the affair, is no ordinary family. This is a passionate story; love between a man and two women, between father and son, and something even more demanding - a love of freedom. It is a highly intimate drama of personal conflict and public struggle in the evolutionary events that, at great cost to people like these, have brought about change in South Africa.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateMar 15, 2012
    ISBN9781408832516
    Unavailable
    My Son's Story
    Author

    Nadine Gordimer

    Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014), the recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in a small South African town. Her first book, a collection of stories, was published when she was in her early twenties. Her ten books of stories include Something Out There (1984), and Jump and Other Stories (1991). Her novels include The Lying Days (1953), A World of Strangers (1958), Occasion for Loving (1963), The Late Bourgeois World (1966), A Guest of Honour (1971), The Conservationist (1975), Burger's Daughter (1979), July's People (1981), A Sport of Nature (1987), My Son's Story (1990), None to Accompany Me (1994), The House Gun (1998), The Pickup (2001), Get a Life (2005), and No Time Like the Present (2012). A World of Strangers, The Late Bourgeois World, and Burger's Daughter were originally banned in South Africa. She published three books of literary and political essays: The Essential Gesture (1988); Writing and Being (1995), the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures she gave at Harvard in 1994; and Living in Hope and History (1999). Ms. Gordimer was a vice president of PEN International and an executive member of the Congress of South African Writers. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in Great Britain and an honorary member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was also a Commandeur de'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France). She held fourteen honorary degrees from universities including Harvard, Yale, Smith College, the New School for Social Research, City College of New York, the University of Leuven in Belgium, Oxford University, and Cambridge University. Ms. Gordimer won numerous literary awards, including the Booker Prize for The Conservationist, both internationally and in South Africa.

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    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      Will is the son to whom the title refers. He is the son of "Sonny," a former schoolteacher and key player in the anti-apartheid movement, and Aila, who cares for Will and his sister Baby and remains uninvolved in Sonny's life as a revolutionary. Will is haunted by a chance meeting with his father one afternoon at a movie theater. His father is there with a white woman. Will knows her because she works for a human rights group and visited their home when Sonny was in prison, but he also knows that she is something more to his father. With that the story begins to unfold, weaving back and forth in time to reveal the impact of an affair and a revolution on a family. I fell under Gordimer's spell immediately. She is a gifted storyteller. Her writing is breathtaking. Consider this description of Will's life:"There's no air in my life. The polished corridors of police stations and prisons have been the joy-rides I've been taken on with the people I love." Or this description of the Supreme Court in the Palace of Justice:"I sat in the great entrance hall among majestic pillars with polished brass feet, under lozenges of coloured light that came steeply from stained-glass windows; their churches and their halls of justice are somehow mixed up, the see some divine authority in their laws."This book is an excellent example of how the story of a single family, while different from the story of every other family, can begins the last chapter with this observation:"It's an old story - ours. My father's and mine. Love, love/hate are the most common and universal of experiences. But no two are alike, each is a fingerprint of life. That's the miracle that makes literature and links it with creation itself in the biological be used to illustrate a nation's history. Will himself makes this point. Part of the story is told from Will's perspective, and he sense." I highly recommend this book and look forward to reading more of Gordimer's work.
    • 4/5
      After a few false starts and stops, I finally got into this extremely well-told tale of apartheid and revolution in South Africa. The beauty of it is that the secret lives of each family member can get so engrossing, that you seem to actually know them.