I guess we’ve all got a lot to say about our parents, but this lady REALLY has a lot to say. This is the third book of hers I’ve read, and it’s the third to mostly be about her parents. Rather than them being a character in her story, I am starting to get the impression that she is a character in theirs. They loom most exceedingly large over her life.
Her parents lived variously across southern Africa, but in her childhood largely in Zimbabwe. There is much that is comic about them. Her father reels at the revelation that a laptop might be expected to die after the first decade, regarding planned obsolescence as a scam (which indeed it probably is).
And there they are on South African politics, an opinion I have heard before in Zim:
The Afrikaaners took it to far, the blacks are bolshie and you can’t blame them. I find it very creepy, all of it. Just look at that Oscar Pistorious.
And her mother after the war that gave birth to Zimbabwe:
I mean she was all of us, all of us Rhodesians; hurt, sore, surprised losers. She’d vowed to fight to the death; and even if everyone else had now forgotten that vow, she’d meant it. . . . She wept bitterly in private; drank bravely in public. “Your mother has difficulty cutting her losses,” Dad had explained.
It’s a book framed around the unexpected death of her father while on holiday in Budapest, but it’s very much a celebration of his life. I don’t know what all this author is working through, but I’m enjoying being a part of it