Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Tambu, an adolescent living in colonial Rhodesia of the '60s, seizes the opportunity to leave her rural community to study at the missionary school run by her wealthy, British-educated uncle. With an uncanny and often critical self-awareness, Tambu narrates this skillful first novel by a Zimbabwe native. Like many heroes of the bildungsroman, Tambu, in addition to excelling at her curriculum, slowly reaches some painful conclusions--about her family, her proscribed role as a woman, and the inherent evils of colonization. Tambu often thinks of her mother, ``who suffered from being female and poor and uneducated and black so stoically.'' Yet, she and her cousin, Nyasha, move increasingly farther away from their cultural heritage. At a funeral in her native village, Tambu admires the mourning of the women, ``shrill, sharp, shiny, needles of sound piercing cleanly and deeply to let the anguish in, not out.'' In many ways, this novel becomes Tambu's keening--a resonant, eloquent tribute to the women in her life, and to their losses. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Dangarembga’s sentences are chromatic, rich and impres-sively precise with wonderful detail.”—The Guardian (UK)
“Dangarembga investigates the ironic psychological demands of global capitalism on a country whose citizens have been fractured by that system. Complex and flawed, they are more than symbols. . . . Dangarembga treats supreme cruelty with sublime reserve.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Dangarembga is a magpie for evocative detail. . . . Dangarembga’s depiction of [Tambu], abject and vulnerable, yet struggling ever onwards, is reminiscent of Jean Rhys at her best.”—The Spectator (UK)
“A great writer. . . . She has a wonderful sense of relationships, a wonderful sense of people, a wonderful sense of place. She ex-poses the oppression, of women in particular, in a manner that I think is beautiful, because you can’t disagree. She is not mak-ing heavy weather of this—it is as natural as the grass grows.”—Chinua Achebe
“Tsitsi Dangarembga opened up the idea that a black woman from Zimbabwe could write a book. There’s a whole genera-tion of Zimbabwean women who are so grateful to Tsitsi for being a forerunner.”—Petina Gappah
Doris Lessing
"Many good novels written by men have come out of Africa, but few by Black women. This is the novel we have been waiting for... it will become a classic."
Young Minds Magazine
"Dangarembga raises issues about culture, conflict, displacement, family relationships, consciousness and emancipation in a postcolonial society. On another level, it illustrates what children raised between two cultures may have to contend with. Nervous Conditions will find an audience with young people (especially women) and those working in health, teaching and social work professions"
The Guardian
"It is the late 1960s and Tambu is a 13- year-old in rural Zimbabwe. “Although our squalor was brutal,” she says, “it was uncompromisingly ours.” Her brother Nhamo has been sent to the mission school in town, his education paid for by her uncle, the family elder. Tambu is thirsty for knowledge, and feels the injustice of being kept on the family homestead, but Nhamo tells her she’d be “better off with less thinking and more respect.” Tsitsi Dangarembga’s semi-autobiographical debut was first published in 1988, when it won a Commonwealth Writers prize. It has since become a staple on Eng Lit courses, and is now reissued with a scholarly introduction. A coming-of-age story, it ticks all the right boxes for student essayists—colonialism, gender, race—and provides a mine of information about Shona customs. Its appeal to lay readers lies with the guileless Tambu, who starts off as a rather prim little girl but turns into a perceptive and independent young woman."
