Review 2199: This Mournable Body

I have already complained about the tendency of Walter Scott Prize judges to pick novels for their shortlist that are in the middle of a series. Now I find the Booker Prize judges selecting the third book in a series. I understand that reading the first two books would have helped me understand this one, but I am not sure my spirit could stand up to two more.

Set in 1990s Zimbabwe during the Mugabe dictatorship, This Mournable Body follows the struggles of Tambudzai, an embittered and sometimes unstable woman. At the beginning of the novel, she is unemployed and living in a youth hostel that she’s too old for, having quit her job as a copywriter for an advertizing agency because credit for her work was going to white employees. Right away, after a disturbing incident where she is turned away from an interview for lodging by a servant, we see an unpleasant side of her when she joins a mob attacking one of her hostel mates because of her short skirt.

Tambodzai makes two moves hoping to improve her lot. She takes a room in the crumbling compound of a rich widow, and she takes a job as a teacher in a girls’ school. Because of her education, she feels she deserves a better position in life, and that’s all she thinks about. She is embarrassed and depressed by her surroundings and sees her teaching job as a comedown. Finally, she has a breakdown in class.

Permeating this novel are references to the recent war, with war veterans complaining that the country, which is poor and struggling, and of course led by a corrupt government, is not what they fought for. But to me many things just seemed vicious. Women are assaulted by strangers, mobs, their husbands and basically told to get over it. The success of one businesswoman who opens a popular store is rewarded by a mob trying to threaten her. Later, when our heroine gets a new opportunity and is enjoying her work in ecotourism, the farm where they lodge tourists is taken over by war veterans with government approval, presumably because it is owned by a white family but perhaps not.

Tambudzai herself is not a nice person for most of the novel, until she experiences some self-revelation. More, though, is that there is a lot of this book I didn’t understand, about people’s attitudes and about the oblique references to the government. The ending provides a small lift; otherwise, I found the novel depressing and hard to stick with.

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