BOOK SA – Reviews

Verdict: carrot

A new publication from Zimbabwe’s Weaver Press, comprising “ten sharply polished stories”.

Something of a boom has occurred in the area of record making about this period of life in the country that has driven texts dealing in either fiction or fact, perhaps even propaganda, to the bookshelves. Judging by literary produce, it is a country that has become all things to all people.

To add to this treasure trove is Daniel Mandishona’s ‘White God, Black Demons’, an anthology of ten short stories published under the Weaver Press stable. Its magic is that it feels startlingly familiar, whatever your politics may be. Each portrait in the 110-page collection is the product of prodigious observation and research, that resembles a return to the 16th century Every (wo)man theatrical genre.

What a reader will cherish is that there is a kind of fidelity about the stories that leaves you knowing it to be true. The characters, and their experiences cut a little too close to the bone. Where else has there been an independent candidate who promises a ‘new dawn’ ahead of a presidential contest held in March, whose results are held back to April?

• Complete review at Pambazuka News

• White Gods, Black Demons homepage

Book Details

• White Gods, Black Demons by Daniel Mandishona
  EAN: 9781779220875
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Uitspraak: wortel, wortel

Twee nuwe boeke oor Zimbabwe is die laaste ruk uitgereik – die jongstes op ’n lang lys werke wat die situasie in hierdie land uit verskillende hoeke aanpak.

Hulle is op uiteenlopende markte gerig: die ligter, meer toeganklike verhaal van ’n af getrede egpaar se stryd om oor lewing en ’n meer akademiese werk gerig op ingeligtes en met ’n duidelike politieke agenda.

• Lees die volledige resensie by Boekeblok (Die Burger)

Boekbesonderhede

• The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe deur Douglas Rogers
  Boektuisblad
  EAN: 9781868423620
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• Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-Colonial Period to 2008 deur Brian Raftopoulos en Alois Mlambo
  Boektuisblad
  EAN: 9781770097636
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Verdict: stick

What do you do when a genre is too broad to accurately categorize a book? You come up with an easy to handle sub-genre – see holocaust literature, apartheid literature, and 9/11 literature among others. So, to call this book tyrant literature would be tempting, but the paucity of active tyrants (thank heavens) means the future of this sub-genre may be a little limited. This book does contain a tyrant, but is more about Zimbabwe the country, and thankfully the corpus on this embattled African country is growing with the arrival of some new voices, such as Petina Gappah and Brian Chikwava.

Add to that list Irene Sabatini with her debut novel The Boy Next Door. This is the story of Lindiwe Bishop, a young black girl in newly-independent Zimbabwe who falls in love with Ian McKenzie, her white neighbour, an otherwise unremarkable adolescent, except he has been convicted of murder. Their love story, stretched over almost two decades, forms the main filament of the novel. In the background, Zimbabwe is falling apart socially and economically. The book contains no small commentary on Mugabe and his cronyism that brings this once prosperous country to the point of near collapse.

• Complete review at Bookmunch

Book Details

• The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini
  EAN: 9780340918821
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Verdict: stick

I am indifferent after reading Robert Kilgore’s recently released book, We Are All Zimbabweans Now. This novel is about American student Ben Dabney who abandons his wife and child to embark on a journey to Zimbabwe in the 1980s.

Zimbabwe had just gained its independence and Ben is interested in Robert Mugabe’s speech in which he mentions that we are all Zimbabwean, including the white people.

He had forgiven the oppressors and that made Ben even more interested in travelling to Zimbabwe, citing that the Americans had something to learn from Zimbabweans. He even calls Zimbabwe the Land of forgiveness.

• Complete review at IOL Tonight

• We are All Zimbabweans Now homepage

Book Details

• We are All Zimbabweans Now by James Kilgore
  EAN: 9781415200711
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Verdict: carrots

This meaty sequel to Nervous Conditions takes Rhodesian teenager Tambuzai from her village and conflicted family into an elite mostly-white high school for girls, where she wades to A-Level via a swamp of academic and personal struggles, often hilarious, always vivid, while mortar bombs in the bush war disturb the nights.

• Complete review in the Sunday Times

With counter-knowledge seemingly the flavour of the decade, it’s good to come across a book that resoundingly debunks theories which are seriously considered – even by some intelligent people – as well as exposing many blatant hoaxes that are accepted as historical fact.

• Complete review in the Sunday Times

Book Details

• The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga
  EAN: 9780954702373
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• Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch
  EAN: 9780224089876
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Verdict: carrot

IT IS sometimes hard to tell the comedy from the horror, the gloom from the exuberant depiction in this wonderfully entertaining portrait of life in modern-day Zimbabwe.

Returning to his parents’ farm and backpacker lodge near Mutare after an absence of many years travel, writer and journalist Douglas Rogers finds that the place is much changed.

• Complete review in The Witness

• The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe homepage

Book Details

• The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe by Douglas Rogers
  EAN: 9781868423620
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Verdict: carrot

Numerous works have been published in recent years on the southern African liberation wars, each good in their way, but Dr Richard Wood provides an outstandingly well-researched book and accompanying DVD.

It concerns the start, strategy and tactics of the Rhodesian Fireforce concept, rather than individuals’ own experiences. By so doing, the book places many of the bush-war biographies into perspective.

To defend white Rhodesia with an army strike force of no more than 1 500 regular soldiers, while sanctions were imposed on both equipment and technology, was a gargantuan task.

Wood expertly elaborates on how this dilemma – together with lessons learned from other low-intensity conflicts (Malaya, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Portuguese Africa) – influenced the thinking, sowing the seed that eventually led to Fireforce.

• Complete review at IOL Tonight

Book Details

• Counter-strike from the Sky: The Rhodesian All Arms in the War in the Bush – 1974-1980 by Richard Wood
  EAN: 9781920143336
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Verdict: carrot

A RADICAL activist in the late sixties and early seventies with links to the Symbion ese Liberation Army (SLA), American-born James Kilgore was indicted for possession of explosives in 1975 but managed to elude the law for 27 years, hiding out in Zimbabwe, Australia and South Africa. ­Living in Cape Town under the ­assumed name of Dr John Pape he became a respected academic but was finally arrested in 2002 and ­extradited to California where he served six-and-a-half years in ­prison.
While incarcerated he wrote his first novel, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, a book which takes its title from a speech made by President Robert Mugabe.

An intriguing blend of fact and fiction, its central character, Ben Dabney, is an idealistic young American doctoral student who, hugely impressed by Mugabe’s seeming magnanimity at the time of independence, decides he wants to write the definitive history of Zimbabwe’s struggle for liberation and reconciliation. By his reckoning Mugabe will emerge as the hero of the book.

• Complete review in The Witness

• We are All Zimbabweans Now homepage

Book Details

• We are All Zimbabweans Now by James Kilgore
  EAN: 9781415200711
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Verdict: carrot

A profile of The Boy Next Door author Irene Sabatini was BOOK SA’s Sunday Read this week. Here, Charles Larson tells us more about the up-and-coming Zimbabwean author’s book:

Irene Sabatini’s deceptive narration in this haunting novel lures the reader in slowly, slowly—coiling like a snake about to spring. By the time you realize that she’s mesmerized you, it’s too late. You’re hooked on Sabatini’s superb narrative skills and there’s nothing to do but read faster and faster. The Boy Next Door is unlike any other novel that I have read about Southern Africa, let alone Zimbabwe the story’s setting.

Part of the compelling narrative is Sabatini’s decision to make no concessions to her readers. Her language is vibrant and colorful. Her characters speak a pastiche of Shona, British English, Zimbabwean street slang, Afrikaans—all gnarled together into sentences that initially seem troubling only because the so-called “foreign” words are not parenthetically explained. No problem, as the story moves on, her characters’ lingo reveals itself by context. To a certain extent, Sabatini employs the same magical process in her plotting. Important details are withheld only to jolt the reader many chapters later when the real “truth” of her story can finally be pieced together. The Boy Next Door is an intellectual puzzle disguised as a detective story. When everything is finally revealed, it’s impossible not to be impressed by Sabatini’s flawless first novel. May she write many more.

• Complete review at Counterpunch

Book Details

• The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini
  EAN: 9780340918821
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Verdict: carrot. Plus funny-sounding laughter:

I have just finish reading Brian Chikwava’s ‘Harare North’. This book so funny it make me go ‘kak kak kak’ all the way. The protagonist is such a humour, he is run away Green Bomber come to London to make US$5000 to pay police back home to leave him alone and to organise umbuyiso for he dead mother. (Green bomber is famous name for youth doing ‘National Service’ under ZANU Pf government in Zimbabwe). He come stay in his cousin Paul and he wife’s Sekai’s house, but it clear to him from moment he arrive and Sekai ask him pay his ticket home that they don’t want him here. As clear to him as the propaganda which he see the news mud-piling on Zimbabwe and she hero Cde Mugabe. But he is determined, he constantly remind us that he is ‘not civilian person’ therefore he is not bothered by ‘civilian style’

• Complete review in The Pen and I

• Harare North homepage

Book Details

• Harare North by Brian Chikwava
  EAN: 9780224086110
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!