Only a few pages into this important novel you can tell that
Gordimer has marshaled all her powers to directly take on, once and
for all, what's at the degraded center of the South African milieu
she has explored before. A Solzhenitsyn would appreciate the
breadth of her rage here; and if this angry, agonized book lacks
anything, it's only Solzhenitsyn's mastery of dramatization and
parable. Lionel Burger, an Afrikaans doctor, was the saint of the
banned South African Communist party; when his daughter Rosa was 14
he was sent to jail for life, only to die shortly thereafter. That
Rosa, who has grown up always on the knife-edge of political
opposition and danger, enters young adulthood steering a course
away from politics is understandable - hasn't her family
contributed enough? She becomes a physiotherapist and is not eager
to do even the mildest anti-government work. But, in a Dostoevskian
scene, she witnesses a drunken Soweto black whipping a donkey with
such blind cruelty that she can't take it anymore: she must flee.
By playing up to a young, brilliant Afrikaans apologist, she
manages to get an exit visa; she flies to the Riviera, her first
trip out of the country, to summer with her father's first wife.
Sybaritic life in France couldn't be more different from what Rosa
is used to: she has a love affair and even considers staying in
Europe until a run-in with a black student she knows from Soweto
clears her mind, recalls her responsibility. She returns to South
Africa, works in a Soweto hospital, and eventually is detained
during the 1977 crackdown on dissidents. Gordimer turns away from
none of the uneasy questions - Lionel's communism ("Who are they to
make you responsible for Stalin and deny you Christ?" Rosa
wonders), white guilt and responsibility, the vast sin that hangs
over anything and anyone associated with apartheid - though the
political ideas are largely, unfortunately relegated to
conversation. Also a problem: the frequent over-tooling of the
prose, in a book that seems by nature to reject too fine a
sensibility. But, although it's not The First Circle or Cancer
Ward, this is a strong, pulsing piece of work in which the moral
imperatives stand right out: the must-read fiction on South Africa
for the 1970s, just as Alan Paton was essential reading a
generation ago. (Kirkus Reviews)
In this work, Nadine Gordimer unfolds the story of a young woman's slowly evolving identity in the turbulent political environment of present-day South Africa. Her father's death in prison leaves Rosa Burger alone to explore the intricacies of what it actually means to be Burger's daughter.
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