Nervous Conditions

Yet another school read that I enjoyed. Well, mostly. It took me almost two days to feel that I was ready to blog about my feelings on this book. I was still processing all of the information, so I couldn't give an honest review right after I finished it. Now, I'm prepared.

This book is really interesting. It takes place in Zimbabwe in the 60s and 70s. Tambudzai, the narrator and main character, is from a poor African family. Her uncle is trying to increase the reputation of the family by making sure that someone from each branch of the family is educated and can bring in money to raise the family from poverty. Tambu's father is the only one of the siblings who is viewed as the disappointment.

Tambu begins the book rather bluntly by stating that she's not sad that her brother dies. It makes sense as you go through. While her brother was alive, he was going to the mission with his uncle to be educated. As a girl, Tambu's life was doomed to be as a wife and mother. She doesn't need to be educated for that. But when her brother dies from illness, she, as the next oldest, is raised up. She goes to the mission to be educated.

While she's there, she begins to really see the divide between African people and English people. She also sees how the educated ones like her uncle and his family are stuck in a weird in-between point. They are viewed as neither African nor English (white). Nyasha, Tambu's cousin, struggles with this. I feel that Nyasha's character is more representative of what females struggle with to this day - the need to be perfect, to be accepted, and to make their families proud of them.

I truly thought this book was a bit of a challenge. It wasn't the almost fluffy fiction that I normally read. Instead it was more raw and human. It was a struggle because I sometimes didn't want to read such raw emotion. But I did, and I'm glad of it.