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Burger's Daughter

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Burger's Daughter

By: Nadine Gordimer
Narrated by: Nadia May
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About this listen

 This is the moving story of the unforgettable Rosa Burger, a young woman from South Africa cast in the mold of a revolutionary tradition. Rosa tries to uphold her heritage handed on by martyred parents while still carving out a sense of self. Although it is wholly of today, Burger's Daughter can be compared to those 19th century Russian classics that make a certain time and place come alive, and yet stand as universal celebrations of the human spirit. Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born and lives in South Africa.©1979 by Nadine Gordimer (P)1993 by Blackstone Audiobooks Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Political World Literature Fiction Africa Social justice

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Critic reviews

"Faultness novelistic art...only equaled in our time by such masters as Graham Greene and V.S. Naipual." (Francine du Plessix Gray)
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What would have made Burger's Daughter better?

It's no longer a sound quality issue. It's entirely a narrator issue. The book is incredibly tiresome but as one reviewer put it, it is certainly "novelistically faultless." The historical part was at times interesting, but boy do you have to slog through endless descriptions of flowers, doors, and digressions that do nothing but bore.

What didn’t you like about Nadia May’s performance?

I'm South African and I can confirm that she didn't check ANY pronunciations. Her Afrikaans, Xhosa, even Portuguese (Samora Machel, pronounced Mackell) were all wrong. I can almost not think of a single word she got right: rondavel, Motlanthe, Mbeki, Knysna, Cloete, you name it. Absolutely unforgivable. If you have to have a non-South African narrator (and I don't see why you'd have to) narrate one SA's finest writers then at very least check pronunciations. Her SA accent is pretty terrible too, but non-SA listeners may not be as bothered. I've listened to May narrate Origins of Totalitarianism and she's a good narrator. Not sure why she's debased herself in this way.

Boring, clueless pronunciation, but prose is Nobel

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It gives a very good sense of what the struggle for freedom took from many, also the tension of that era. It is also good glimpse of a personal awakening. Unfortunately the narrator is somewhat shrill at times and no attempt is made to pronounce foreign words correctly which causes some distraction.

Enjoyable

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Some of the conversations about race relations and Marxism are mildly interesting, but overall this book barely has a plot and meanders from one bland scene to another with very little driving it.

The way it is written makes it seem like your hearing an account of her life from the outside in but an account with any vitality taken out. The protagonist is not a human but an automaton. You also don’t leave the book with a particularly detailed sense of what life in South Africa was like under apartheid.

Dull, uneventful barely has a plot

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