Word: rosa
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Gordimer's prose, brutal in its precision and sensuousness, conveys Rosa's struggle with an immediacy that makes detachment impossible. She bombards us with images harsh and lush; passion for the country whose policies she hates scorches the pages, evoking South Africa's beauty, sordidness and terror. She moves from the overripe living room of an apartheid apologist to the stinking hut in a black township, from the lucid vigor of South Africa to the luxury of the Rivieva. Her prose mimics the near-cryptic, emotionally loaded economy of poetry, with all its symbolic richness. Reading this book is almost...
...donkey's silent writhing drives Rosa from her country. The beating captures in one unbearable moment the essence of South Africa for Rosa Burger--her implication as a white in blacks' suffering. As a white spectator, she is powerless to stop the donkey's suffering or those of the blacks in her country...
...Rosa's frustration is the white man's burden in South Africa. Their guilt, anger and fear creates an emotional chasm between races far more disturbing than the state-imposed physical separation. Blacks reject the whites who rejected them, and both are disenfranchised...
...most poignant reminder of this racial gulf is the wrenching reunion between Rosa and her black childhood friend Baasie in London. After meeting at a party and exchanging social inanities, Baasie calls Rosa in the middle of the night. Raging, he taunts her for her pride in Lionel, reminding her that anonymous black men are killed every day, and they are no less heroic than her father. She counters brutally until they fall tidily into the roles apartheid has prescribed for them--bitter black, guilty white...
Baasie's hostility jolts Rosa from her comfortable daydream, forcing her to confront the question she has fled: whether to fight or capitulate. Rosa, the reluctant dissident, is not larger than life. She is not like her singleminded father, who chose his path without regrets or soul-searching. Rosa must find her own way to fight. Her heroism is more moving because it is more human, because her conflicts--both selfish and unselfish--mirror...