Word: rosa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...emotional cost of such vigilance. Running to the warmth and decadence of a small French village, she seeks out her father's first wife, Katya, to learn how to say no to the Future. Katya left Lionel and South Africa's demands, seeking refuge in France. She tells Rosa...
France--its tolerance, shallowness, luxury--seduces and shocks Rosa. She gazes at the flamboyant prostitutes with mingled horror and awe of the country girl whisked to the big city. But only in France, away from the inbred defences against vulnerability, can she fall in love, giggle like the young girl she never was, laugh and cry unselfconsciously...
...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...