My Son’s Story (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Nadine Gordimer
- First Published: 1990
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: The 1970’s and 1980’s
- Setting: Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Rustenburg, South Africa
- Principal Characters: Sonny, Aila, Baby, William (Will), Hannah Plowman
- Genres: Long fiction, Social realism, Political fiction
- Subjects: Social action, Teaching or teachers, Family or family life, Politics, Prisoners, Prisons, Racism, Revolutionaries, Blacks, Interracial relationships, Human rights, 1980’s, Adultery, South Africa or South Africans, Apartheid
- Locales: Johannesburg, South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa, Rustenburg, South Africa
Both in her works and in interviews, Nadine Gordimer has made it clear that she disapproves of apartheid; it was her sympathy with blacks that caused South Africa to ban three of her novels, A World of Strangers (1958), The Late Bourgeois World (1966), and Burger’s Daughter (1979). As some of her more perceptive critics have pointed out, however, Gordimer herself is in two ways an outsider in the movement with which she sympathizes: She is white and she is a woman. It may well be that it is this sense of alienation, or at least of difference, that enables Gordimer to write...
[The entire page is 2344 words long]
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