Nervous Conditions (Nervous Conditions, #1) in Around the World

Aug 23, 2018 Claire rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, around-the-world, zimbabwean-literature, around-the-world-2019

Absolutely brilliant, one of the most interesting characters I've come across in my cross cultural journey's, portrayed with such raw honesty, I'm in awe and immensely relieved there is another book to follow, because I'm not ready to leave it there.

It's a coming of age story of Tambu, a teenage girl, who in the beginning lives in a small village with her parents and siblings and their days are hard, especially the women, who work in the fields all day, do the laundry at the river, transport wat Absolutely brilliant, one of the most interesting characters I've come across in my cross cultural journey's, portrayed with such raw honesty, I'm in awe and immensely relieved there is another book to follow, because I'm not ready to leave it there.

It's a coming of age story of Tambu, a teenage girl, who in the beginning lives in a small village with her parents and siblings and their days are hard, especially the women, who work in the fields all day, do the laundry at the river, transport water to and fro and cook in a kitchen that lacks modern conveniences and requires some skill and tenacity to manage. Despite the hard work Tambu loves her village and even the work and chores equally provide moments of pleasure and companionship.

Her cousins and Aunt and Uncle return from five years in England furthering their education so he can become headmaster of the mission school. Tambu is disappointed that her cousin isn't as friendly towards her as she was, the "englishness"has changed them. Her brother is offered the opportunity to get and education at the school where he teaches and Tambu having had to quit her education, sets about implementing a plan to earn her own school fees.

Thus she too is set on the path of an education informed by "english influences" though she retains her deep family and village values. However, being around and observing her cousin, and learning of the frustration of her Aunt, begins to slightly change her world view, as she dedicates herself to being the best pupil possible and the most respectful niece possible.

The subtle way her character transitions to greater awareness is so adeptly done, her feelings of ambition and regret as she realises it may be impossible to achieve all that she aspires to without losing something of what she had. She observes her cousin rebel and then accept that middle ground and fall victim to it, unable to go back, and alienated from her own.

All her characters are multi dimensional, portrayed in a way that even though they inflict suffering on another, we are made to understand their point of view and realise the dilemmas and complexities they face.

In an interview the author explains this:

One can hold a person responsible for reacting to a situation in a certain way, but the situation that exerted the pressure to behave in that way must also be addressed.

I'm so glad I've read this early on, so I can get to the next two books in the trilogy The Book of Not and This Mournable Body.
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Apr 04, 2019 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: author-ofcolour, author-woman, z-read-gelesen-2020, 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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