My Son's Story--Compendium

Fascinating Passages

“I don’t want to think about it now.  I don’t want to think he pretends she’s pink and thick and soft; as I pretend, in dreams, that I’m doing things to them, the blondes in full-page spreads I tear out” (46).

For me, this unwanted assimilation of father and son was at the heart of the tension in this novel.  And it goes both ways—the son disgusted by the revelation that his father possesses a sexual appetite similar to his own, and the father threatened by his son’s entrance into manhood.  I felt like a lot of the scorn that Will reserved for his father came out of a frustration of living in Sonny’s shadow.  How appropriate a name, then, “Sonny”?

“The smell of smoke, that was the smell of her. / The smell of destruction, of what has been consumed, that he first brought into that house” (274). 

I really didn’t expect this, which is part of the reason it impacted me in the way it did, but the other reason was that it represented Hannah so well; an agent of chaos disguised as something else.  Disguised as a need, as passion, as something positive to burn with desire for.  Yet even at this moment, Sonny still seems to have no concept of the toll the affair has taken on his family.  Or at least if he does, he doesn’t care.  His domestic livelihood is smoldering behind him, and his mind still turns to “the cause.”

New Words

fecklessly

inveigle

genuflect

diastole

ectoplasmic

Arresting Imagery

Ice-blue sky, yellow dumps, black veld, like the primary colors of a flag.  Our burnt-out picnic.  She would never have known where to find us, there (38).

The shadowless mauve of the jacaranda full-blown, ectoplasmic, near his face, tree ferns airing green wings spread over the pond tiled with lily leaves, the mist of live warmth from cut grass (142).

Notes/Strategies

- Gordimer has a marvelous talent for expressing her familial characters’ emotions through use of details that are specific to each person, rather than simply stating that he/she is angry/depressed/frustrated/smug

            - Examples:

            - I’ll bet I could bring up the questions of a motorbike again now, and maybe I’d get it (46).

            - She sat on the edge of her chair and looked at me as if she had known me her whole life, not just the span of mine which had begun in her body (61). What a beautiful line that I want to steal.  I’ve never read anything like that before about a mother.

            - Watching Sonny, listening to Sonny, she felt at last she could define sincerity, also—it was never speaking from an idea of oneself (112).

            - They made love again, the kind of love-making that brings the dependent fear that one could never live, again, without it (174).  This tells me exactly what Sonny was trying to accomplish with this encounter.  It tells me that he feared losing Hannah, and this was his final performance in efforts to retain her.

            - But he was mistaken; he’s lost the instinct for sensing my mother’s presence in some other room.  They were empty.  She was not there.  Not for him, not for me (178).

Misc. Quotations I found Striking

. . . not the kind where the vocabulary was limited to onomatopoeic exclamations by supermen . . . (20)

Even Hannah had never before experienced what the blacks, with their rags kept on their persons as protection against tear-gas as white people carry credit cards, were ready for every day (116).

She never came back.  Cut loose.  She was gone for good: my mother (168).