Nervousness

It took me a while to genuinely get started on Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel Nervous Conditions, the one Sakhar passed to me for consideration as a text for next year, but once into it I found it a very rewarding read. I think I expected something on the lines of the Edwidge Danticat novel I read this time last year, but this one confounded any such expectations. The language is not as self-consciously poetic as that of Danticat, it simply does what it needs to and does it well, but Nervous Conditions is a more richly textured experience in terms of rendering the complexity of the lives of those it depicts.

The sympathies of the writer are clearly, and rightly, with her splendid female protagonists Tambu and Nyasha, yet both have sometimes irritating limitations that can alienate the reader, at least at moments. We are not allowed anything in the way of a simplistic analysis of the feminine psyche in Africa - assuming there is such a thing. The brittleness of the wonderfully brave, rebellious Nyasha is particularly well done.

And the book has two or three fine monsters of masculinity, monsters because they are trapped in a way of thinking that demands monstrosity from them. Yet the most striking of these, Babamukuru, is also believably a decent sort who is trying very hard to be not just a good man but an outstanding individual. The scene when he first strikes Nyasha is red hot. Tambu's father Jeremiah though a minor character is also a brilliant picture of a thoroughly lazy good-for-nothing. But then all the minor characters are beautifully drawn, something that I'm just realising as I think back to my reading. This is a writer with real compassion for her creations.

The title, from a line in Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, is in itself perfect. The sense of the unfairness of the demands made upon these people by the circumstances in which they must live pervades the novel, resulting in a nervousness that the reader is made to share, at second hand, at any rate.