Nervous Conditions

by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Overview

A modern classic from the Booker-shortlisted author of This Mournable Body

The groundbreaking first novel in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s award-winning trilogy, Nervous Conditions, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and has been “hailed as one of the 20th century’s most significant works of African literature” (The New York Times). Two decades before Zimbabwe would win independence and ended white minority rule, thirteen-year-old Tambudzai Sigauke embarks on her education. On her shoulders rest the economic hopes of her parents, siblings, and extended family, and within her burns the desire for independence. She yearns to be free of the constraints of her rural village and thinks she’s found her way out when her wealthy uncle offers to sponsor her schooling. But she soon learns that the education she receives at his mission school comes with a price.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644451632
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	05/18/2021
Series:	Nervous Conditions Series
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	167,328
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Tsitsi Dangarembga was born and brought up in Zimbabwe. She studied medicine and psychology before turning to writing full-time and becoming the first Black woman in Zimbabwe to publish a novel in English. Nervous Conditions was the recipient of the 1989 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Fiction, the book has become a modern classic. Nervous Conditions was also chosen as one of the ‘Top Ten Books of Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century’ by a Pan African Initiative in 2002. Dangarembga’s sequel to Nervous Conditions entitled The Book of Not was published in 2006 by Ayebia. In addition, she has written a play entitled She No Longer Weeps. Having studied at the German Film and Television Academy, Dangarembga now also works as a scriptwriter, consultant and film director. She is the founder of International Images Film Festival for Women (IIFF). She is currently working on the third novel in the trilogy and lives in Zimbabwe.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

"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."

Doris Lessing

"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"

Young Minds Magazine

"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."

The Guardian