title: Nervous Conditions by: Dangarembga, Tsitsi published: 2020-10-19 read: 2021-09 preview

What can I say if Doris Lessing writes positively about this book? Tsitsi Dangarembga is a Zimbabwe author, and that in itself is already remarkable. The older readers under us have known Zimbabwe as Rhodesia, as it was called in its apartheid days which ended with independence in the late 1970s.

Apart from winning many prizes, the book is listed as one of the BBC’s top 100 books that changed the world. Why? Well, one reason being that Zimbabwe female authors do not normally become internationally renown and publish influential books. But most certainly not the only or main one.

Narrated by its main character, Tambu, who is aged, I guess 12 to 14, or thereabouts. And with Tambu’s statement, the book sets a pace perhaps unparalleled in literature: I was not sorry when by brother died.

The next third or so of the book sets the events until this happens, and it kept me bewildered with how and why her brother died, but perhaps also most importantly, why she was not sorry. And it’s a credible development of events.

The book describes how Tambu fights her life from simple rural Rhodesian life – the book’s story runs in the 1960s – to her liberation through education. Being engrossed in education, family love and envy, education and apartheid. The latter is not a topic in the book, and perhaps understandably so.

Highly recommended. Dangarembga wrote two follow up novels, the third being published in 2018. In those, Tambu follows her educational path, painful as it is.