About this title: Bam and Maureen Smales, a South African couple who pride themselves on their liberal views on apartheid, find their lives turned around when a revolution puts their servant, July, in charge of their lives and their fates. How they confront this challenge provides the plot in Gordimer's tough take on the appalling realities of apartheid, and on the ...
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Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Penguin Books
Date Published: 1982
ISBN-13:9780140061406ISBN:0140061401
Description: Good. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Brown/blue painterly cover, moderate corner, edge wear. Pages very good. When South Africa is riven by war and the Smales, a white couple, take refuge in the village of their former servant July, their relationships are completely transformed. 160 pages. Few bookstore marks. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. May have wear or tear to spine, edges and or cover. Creases in spine. Bent/rounded corners. May have highlighting/notes. read more
"I loved the writing style of this book. The description, the dialogue, all add to the tension that evolves between the characters. One wonders about the Smales liberal-mindedness. I questioned which character I admire. This book is one for great discussion -- especially the ending."
"The relationship between "Master" and "Boy" in the changing South Africa of the late 70's is explored with great and disturbing insight in this novel by the 1991 Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer. A white Johannesburg family flees the black uprising that is spreading from Soweto with an African "boy" who has served them for fifteen years. They are transported to their servant's village where they confront the other half of his life, the African half, which they had never seen nor fully acknowledged before, despite their "liberalism." This is no simple story of the inversion of the master/servant relationship but a highly nuanced treatment of how persistent certain patterns are, and how those patterns can finally bend and snap in an entirely new cultural context. What is so impressive in Gordimer is how well she captures language and the powerful role language plays in a stratified and multilingual place like South Africa. Finally, I must say that I admire the terse, strength of Gordimer's style, but it has different rhythms than the typical American or British style, so I often found myself rereading sentences to get the rhythm and hence even the meaning right!"
"Novelist Nadine Gordimer, a South African, won the Nobel Prize in 1991. July's People is about a liberal Afrikaaner couple who, with their four children, escape the urban violence of the early 80s by hiding in the village of the African man, July, who has been their servant for fifteen years. The entire book is set in the native village, and focuses on the intricacies of role reversal and the complexities of the master-servant and white-black relationships: subjects Gordimer handles with great skill and insight. And she writes uncommonly well: both forcefully and poetically, and with a keen eye for the details of life in an African village. This is an excellent book. A sample of her writing:
The incredible tenderness of the evening surrounded them as if mistaking them for lovers. She lurched over and posed herself, a grotesque, against the vehicle's hood, her shrunken jeans poked at the knees, sweat-coarsened forehead touched by the moonlight, neglected hair standing out wispy and rough. The death's harpy image she made of herself meant nothing to him, who had never been to a motor show complete with provocative girls. She laughed and slapped the mudguard vulgarly, as she had done to frighten a beast out of the way. The sharp sound flew back to them from the settlement. A little homely fire, the first of those for the evening meal, began to show over there as a match flame grows cupped in a palm."
"July's People is the September book selection for my reading group; and, even though it is a short book, I found myself stuggling to get to the end. I didn't like the book at all. The author dumps the reader into a uprising/ riot situation in South Africa. The white people in the story are saved by their servant, July, who is black. July takes them to his village; and, once there, the tables slowly become turned. Because there was almost no context in which to become oriented, I found that I often didn't really understand some of the things that were happening. Also, one consequence of just beginning a story in it's middle is that character development is minimal. The result for me was reading about people and events that didn't seem very real."
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