I’ve reviewed NERVOUS CONDITIONS for Africa Book Club here.
It’s an engaging novel about a girl from a poor rural background who is given the opportunity to have an expensive western education, and about the difficulties and possibilities that education brings with it.
I found it to be a sophisticated little book, though I was fascinated by the strong sense throughout the story that having to add a new culture into your experience is inherently negative. In the diasporized Zimbabwe of today, this view seems sort of charmingly antiquated. Nowadays, you’re never more of the Zimbabwean zeitgeist than when you live in South Africa, so to suggest that leaving home is such a big deal seems very sweetly of the innocent eighties.