I had to read this book for the course I am studying this year. Sadly this is a very worthy novel but isn't a novel I will rush to reread. I really didn't care about Rosa Burger and her struggle for identity and I just could not engage with the book. ( )

I realize that Burger’s Daughter is an Important Book, and that the author won a Nobel Prize for Literature. That doesn’t make me like this book, although it wasn’t all bad.
It is the story of one woman’s search for self-identity. Her challenge is that she grew up in the shadow of parents who were famous anti-apartheid activists in South Africa. Part of the story is told in first person narration, and partly by an omniscient narrator; this is one of the techniques that I think works quiet well (the narrator clarifies some of the stream of consciousness rambling of the first person narrator).
This is not a book to read quickly. The author writes in a cryptic style that often requires contemplation at the sentence-by-sentence level. Her weakness is definitely dialogue. In what seems like an attempt at realism, she throws out all conventions for representing speech (including quotation marks and the opaque “he said”). She mixes narration and dialogue in this “creative” style, and the result is confusion. At one point, there is a lengthy conversation between a group of people that results in pages and pages of gibberish. A motivated reader would be able to figure it all out, but frankly, for the most part, the book wasn’t interesting enough to put out the effort. There were pages scattered throughout that were interesting and I realized that I was enjoying the book and hadn’t been working at it, but those parts are few and too far between. There are also many beautiful examples of unique phrasing. It’s too bad Gordimer made a mess of the book with her style for representing dialogue. ( )

Had to read this for a course and it was a struggle, until I suddenly 'got' it and the genius with which Gordimer shows us Rosa's dilemmas and loyalties in impossible situations in South Africa. ( )