My Son's Story—Compendium

Gordimer, Nadine. My Son’s Story. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, Ltd., 1990.

“Of course I know her. That broad pink expanse of face they have, where the features don’t appear surely drawn as our are, our dark lips, our abundant, glossy dark lashes and eyebrows, the shadows that give depth to the conours of our nostrils. Pinkish and white-downy—blurred; her pink, unpainted lips, the embroidered blouse over some sort of shapeless soft cushion )it dented when she moved) that must have been her breasts, the long denim skirt with its guerrilla military pockets—couldn’t she make up her mind whether she wanted to look as if she’d just come from a garden party or a Freedom Fighters’ hide in the bush? (15)

“It wasn’t only self-respect my father had; people respected him, not even a drunk would curse him. I don’t know what made all sorts of men and women feel he would find for them their way out of the bewilderment of debt, ignorance, promiscuity and insecurity that giddied them, so that they lunged from one sordid obstacle to the next.” (18)

“To be confronted with the monumental, friendly high-riding backsides of the women, the dusty felted heads of the men, the beauty of the lolling babies on the mothers’ backs—it was surely only to see and know that if you wanted to claim a self that, by right, ought  to be accepted by the town, you had another self with an equal right—one that was malediction, not to be thought of—to me claimed by them. (22)

“She drove a Volkswagen Beetle through the battleground streets of Soweto to find old people who didn’t know whether to trust her, she was received in the neat segregated suburbia of Bosmont and Lenasia by women who didn’t know how they were going to keep up payments on the glossy furniture, she lost herself in the squatter camps where addresses didn’t exist and the only routes marked in the summer muck of mud and rot were those rutted by the wheelbarrows of people fetching their supplies of beer from the liquor store on the main road.” (90)

“Or it was as if someone suddenly flipped the mini-series flashed on. Violence was so thin an appearance in the living-room that shadow of someone’s head, moving across the room, was enough to blot it out. Now, why, you could see the hair on the policeman’s forearm.” (104)

—Group Consciousness on 110.

“His existence gave her the surety: that was what authority meant, it was not the authority of the weapons  on the hill. If he used the vocabulary of politics because certain words and phrases were codes everybody understood—no interpreter necessary, even in the English in which they were formulated they expanded in each individual’s hearing to carry the meaning of his own frustrations, demands and desire—Sonny did not adopt the usual mannerisms the vocabulary produces.” (112)

How much of this blew over in the wind to the formation on the hill is not known.” (114)—Avoid this.

He was delivering his daughter’s rose to the dead. In a sideways glance with only a few feet between them they acknowledged each other across the graves like people who cannot put a name to a face.” (115)

“The only thing he left me to find out for myself were his own contradictions.” (121)

“Any kind of war, any kind. So at least if wee have to accept violence, we know what we’re doing, we’re not dolling it up. I find that helps.” (128)

“They’ve all left, the performance is over. He came out of the cinema into the bright daylight; and me.” (135)

Poor Aila (136)— Don’t buy it.

“He heard her double step, high heels touching the floor before the soles came lightly down, and thought she had left the room. But she had paused: —I wish you could go.—” (149)

“She went away with a man, she had been living with a man while he was with his woman in the cottage. As discreet, not only politically, as the father himself.” (168)—?

“And yet his only relief from tension over the ambiguities and intrigues that were growing in the movement was to turn to this other anguish, his need of Hannah. And from that anguish back to dismay at the position he was being manoeuvred into by certain comrades.” (171)

“Stale, stale. Sonny was unaware that he was slowly waving his head from side to side...” (192)—?

Omniscient—201

“He could not resist it, although it was not what he wanted. What he wanted, from her, was what no-one could give him back; his trust in himself.” (201)

“He sank beside her. They were stretched out like two figures on a tomb commemorating a faithful life together.” (203)

“He took her head in his hands and began to hiss her cruelly, he pushed hard fingers under her clothes out there where people could have come upon them, like any coarse drunk dragging a woman outside during a party.” (216)

Great Chaos on 229

“He had made love to Aila. But then he had never stopped making love to Aila...”(242)—Ehhh.

“He listened to Aila breathing, giving a little snore, now and then, and smelt the too-sweet odour of her skin creams warmed by the rise of her body temperature in sleep—the cloying familiarity  in marriage, flee from it to the clandestine love wild and free of habit—stanch the longing for everything he had fled.” (243)

“Is there some birthmark or something that says this is what I must be?—” (254)

“I followed him through the shattered ice-floes of glass and soggy mounds of timber, clambered over contorted and melted metal, bent with him below the jagged shelf of lead ceiling that hung from a single support left upright.” (273)—great movement