Rosa era una niña cuando su padre, Lionel Burger, fue condenado a cadena perpetua por promover la revolución en Sudáfrica. A partir de entonces, empezará un camino que la llevará a replantearse lo que realmente significa ser la hija de Burger.

Entre los que esperaban delante de la fortaleza había una colégiale con uniforme marrón y amarillo, llevaba un edredón...

A dense, complex book about family, politics and ideals. ( )

A real stinker! It could have been a great story set in South Africa during apartheid. However, the author's style made it more than a struggle to read. She jumped from 1st to 3rd person frequently, she didn't use quotation marks so sometimes I could not figure out if this was a thought or an actual conversation. She also moved from the past to the present and in between within the same page. I was lost! I didn't know if the main character was remembering a person or actually right there talking to them. I love it when an author writes a great story. I don't like it when the author tries to make a story great by using unconventional grammar. I read 90/363 pages and I quit! DNF 1 star I assume this was a Nobel book because of the topic? ( )

This was my first "go" at a novel by Nobel-Prize winning author Gordimer, and I really really wanted to like it. But - ooh, it was a slog, and rather a long haul to finish. South Africa is important, reading books about apartheid is necessary, but it seemed as if Gordimer was trying to make her character's story as inaccessible as possible. The "high modernist" style puts a great distance between the author and the reader. (I think book this was more difficult to read than late Henry James.)

The central character Rosa Burger is the daughter of a great anti-Apartheid activist and his equally committed anti-Apartheid wife. In the course of the book, she emerges from the shadow of her parents to become her own person. All this takes place in the backdrop of South Africa - specifically in and around Johannesburg - in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with most of the action taking place prior to the 1976 Soweto riots. Gordimer uses an interesting narrative style, not in itself an issue - there is both a first-person narrator, and a third person voice as well. The problem is that both used the same abstract, indirect, verbose, overly complex diction - so that they were both rather indistinguishable - as well as both being undistinguished. Too many compound complex sentences that don't go anywhere! And, finally, Gordimer does not use quotation marks for character speech - and I found it very annoying not always to be able to tell the difference between spoken words and inner thoughts. ( )