Nervous Conditions in Around the World in 80 Books

Sep 10, 2018 Beverly rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, africa, cross-cultural, newtome2018, zimbabwe

thoughts coming shortly

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Apr 04, 2019 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: author-woman, z-read-gelesen-2020, author-ofcolour, 5-star, world-zimbabwe, c_quest-readtheworld

I did not want this book to finish. Doing Goodreads challenges tempts me to rush through books and to clock up completions but this one, I wanted to eke out and looked with dismay upon the diminishing 'compression of the pages'. What a wonderful, deep, rich, resonant, yet light-of-touch read.

It is a coming-of-age story, following the first-person narrator Tambudzai throughout her girlhood, from her childhood in her homestead in a small poor village in Zimbabwe, to her early adolescence in her u I did not want this book to finish. Doing Goodreads challenges tempts me to rush through books and to clock up completions but this one, I wanted to eke out and looked with dismay upon the diminishing 'compression of the pages'. What a wonderful, deep, rich, resonant, yet light-of-touch read.

It is a coming-of-age story, following the first-person narrator Tambudzai throughout her girlhood, from her childhood in her homestead in a small poor village in Zimbabwe, to her early adolescence in her uncle's mission school, and into late adolescence into what would be a spoiler. It reminded me of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre with its focus on school life, overbearing patriarchs and surviving in a household ruled by a despotic older brother (in Jane Eyre's case, male cousin), and with its prickly first-person-narrator. It reminded me of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels Series Elena Ferrante Collection 4 Books Bundle My Brilliant Friend series of books with its nuanced exploration of a complex female friendship. In fact, I loved this about Nervous Conditions: how there is no tedious intrusion of a heterosexual "love" interest, how nobody rescues the girls and the women besides themselves, how the relationship between Tambudzai and her girl cousin Nyasha is full of difficulty, jealousy, need, fascination, unvoiced love -- all the complexity and richness that exist in friendships.

What I also loved, and what I love in all novels (and this one reminded me of it) is the unique specificity of each character. There is not a single black-and-white character in this entire book. And whenever you think you've hit upon some firm principle, grounded in ideology, the narrative unsettles you. People are people. Their foibles are sometimes amusing, at other times tragic, changeable, and shaped by and shaping of their environment. There is exquisite attention to material detail -- the way an oven looks in a kraal kitchen; the feel of a pleated gymslip uniform; the delicate porcelain of cups in a glass vitrine. I did not only learn about but felt my way into the intricate hierarchies within this family which are in turn shaped by wider cultural hierarchies.

My edition is the Women's Press edition (love that publisher! mourn its demise!) of 1988, reprinted in 1993 and set as an Open University text. The many endorsements printed on the cover and the front matter stress the book's African-ness but one thing is good, I guess: we are no longer so impressed by the mere fact of literature being written in Africa and no longer seek so desperately for signs of 'authenticity' and 'political engagement'. To me, these blurbs with their emphasis on colonial oppression don't actually cut to the heart of this book. To be sure, post-colonial history, the mission, the 'Whites' play an important role but if you read this, you will see how these circumstances and shaping forces are interwoven into a story that is not 'about them' as such. In this sense, the book also reminded me of Scholastique Mukasonga's wonderful Our Lady of the Nile which is set in a Rwandan girls' boarding school and focalises a whole history of colonialism and inter-tribal genocide through the eyes of young girls, preoccupied with fashions, friendships, jealousies and celebrity.

Format and provenance: I bought this for £3.50 from the Amnesty International Bookshop. The pages are roughly textured (think Communist German toilet paper) with the ink bleeding into the paper and the font fairly small. I quite like the forest green of the cover (a colour that is surprisingly rare in book covers) but did not take to the painting of a bald, scowling girl in an undefined ochre gown (none of this chimes in with my experience of the book). The illustration is by Claudette Johnson. (Mind you, the other edition with the photo of a handsome young woman is equally misleading and annoying.) The title font is pseudo-African, in a faux kente cloth style. Again, I could do with these essentialising details.

This has been on my tbr list for many years (in a past life, I made an amazon wishlist of 'world literature'; that was before I discovered how Goodreads and Bookstagram make it so much easier to find such books) and is part of my current interest in making my reading way through a map of Africa and South America. ...more

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