Wow, this is quite a special book. I have read other reviews saying it is not very accessible and it certainly demands a lot of thinking from the reader but it also a very engrossing read! I have not read the two previous books, and still found myself immersed in Tambudzai's story, and almost enthralled by the cyclical rhythm of her story.

I am a bit mixed about that one. I really enjoyed some parts of it - the main character is unlikeable but I did like that - I find it refreshing to have a main character who messes up so much and so often. I enjoyed a lot of this book, including the fact that not much is going on at times, But towards the end it felt like the author was trying to pack as much action as possible within a few pages, which felt odd and did not quite match the pace of the rest of the book. Other than that, I loved the writing - clean, clear, and I liked the "You" all along.

In this novel we follow the life of Tambudzai Segau as she copes with life in the post-war Zimbabwe. Starting life in a traditional village she goes on to study at a prestigious local school. Does her life pan out as her parents expect and how will she cope with life in Harare? The wonderfully evocative and, at times, lyrical writing of Dangarembga draws a picture of just how hard it is for a woman to succeed in Zimbabwe's politically corrupt and male dominated society. We come to understand the immense importance of family and tradition to Tambudzai and how they direct many of her choices. The recognition of what truly matters to Zimbabweans, allied to reading about how they perceive white people, certainly lends credence to why we should all read literature from other cultures. Where Dangaremba excels is in her seamless blending of her Zimbabwean culture with an intensely moving story. Definitely a book that has my recommendation and I am not at all surprised to see it is shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Again I didn't realize this was part of a trilogy and I do think that was why I didnt' quite get on with the book. Clearly very well written though.

Such a moving story, eye opening in a very moving way. When you read this book you just want things to be different in the world. I loved the strength of the main character, I just wish the world was kinder to them. If this book doesn’t move you to tears, maybe you are part of the worlds problems.

It’s such a shame I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I really wanted to. This book is beautifully written. Also it is definitely a strong standalone novel. While it is the third in a series, you didn’t need to know anything about the plot or characters before reading it. However this book has a very floaty quality so much so that the plot seems non existent. The main protagonist Tambudzai flits between relatives homes and unsuccessful job roles trying to figure her life out. While this novel touches on some really interesting themes such as mental health, war trauma and Zimbabwean identity. I really struggled to stay immersed in the story. I absolutely loved the authors writing style. It was exquisite and lyrical and the authors wider social commentary was poignant. Unfortunately I just didn’t enjoy this novel very much.

Thank you to the publisher Faber and Faber, the author Tsitsi Dangarembga and Netgalley for a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

I was really looking forward to reading this, as both book and author sound so interesting. Unfortunately, I hadn't realised it was the third of a trilogy and found it didn't grab me as there was no getting to know the characters. I do think you need to start with book one on this.

I found this story confusing and it took a lot of perseverance to keep reading. I think I would have understood and enjoyed the story more if I had read the first two books.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

I got the chance to read the Booker-shortlisted This Mournable Body thanks to NetGalley. I've read very little fiction set in Africa or by African authors and know hardly anything about Zimbabwe and its history. I certainly want to learn more after reading this; it’s an unflinching portrayal of someone with dwindling resources and few options.
Set in Harare at the turn of the millennium, it’s the third of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novels about Tambudzai, a woman who grew up during the civil war which devastated so many families, hers included. It’s a second-person narrative, which I found a little disconcerting at first. But I see now that it is a good way of bringing the reader into the story, especially useful when the characters’ experiences are so different to my own.
I haven’t read the previous books about Tambu. I wonder if it would have helped me adjust more quickly to the style if I had. I appreciate a book that respects its reader’s intelligence, asking them to fill in the gaps rather than being spoon-fed. Sometimes, though, I didn’t feel up to the task, wondering what I had missed. That said, as I read on, I became more and more interested in where things would lead for Tambu. There was a real sense of looming dread; just what would go wrong for her next? The descriptions of Tambu’s hallucinations were powerful and unsettling but entirely plausible: who wouldn’t be unhinged having seen what she had seen? After a tentative start, I raced through this book and would recommend it to anyone who wants their eyes opened to a different world.

This is an incredible, beautifully written, exquisite piece of work. Its nominated for the booker prize after recently being shortlisted and i can understand why. This is an intense, emotional portrayal of life and womanhood and identity, and is so beautifully written.

I just couldn’t relate to the protagonist of this story of a contemporary Zimbabwean woman struggling with her life in an often violent society, not helped by the fact that she uses the second person throughout which had a curiously alienating effect on me. The writing is overblown and the narrative disjointed. It may be that I should have read the first two volumes of the trilogy to get to know her and perhaps empathise more with her, but as it is I found her so self-defeating and self-pitying, that she just annoyed me. Her life hasn’t turned out as she once hoped – but whose fault is that? The country? Her employers? Her own self-destructive tendency? It’s not clear and I found that frustrating. Certainly some knowledge of Zimbabwean history is necessary here, as little help is give in the narrative, but even with that I found it a challenging, bleak, depressing and ultimately pointless read. Or did I simply miss the point? Whatever the case, I didn’t enjoy it.

I chose this book because of its longlisting for the 2020 Booker Prize, and because I’ve loved reading so many multicultural stories lately, but unfortunately this one just left me feeling confused most of the time. It feels as though there were many things left unsaid that the reader should be able to fill in the blanks for, but clearly I am not smart enough for this one! Unfortunately none of the characters really grabbed me and I found this a fairly laborious read but, as always, I know that this is a problem with my understanding rather than the novel itself which so many people clearly love.

This is certainly an unusual and challenging book. It gives insights into the dire state of living for many citizens of Zimbabwe. Tambudzai has walked out on a job, has no money and lives in filthy accommodation where she becomes depressed at the lack of prospects for someone like her. And who is that? She is an intelligent woman with a university degree but that is not enough in this impoverished, discriminating society. Eventually she gets her act together with help from a long term friend and improves her life. The writing is insightful, no doubt an accurate reflection of society in that country. It is more a social commentary than an absorbing read.

This is the third book in the 'Nervous Conditions' series and my failure to enjoy it maybe down to starting with book 3. This book was long listed for Booker Prize so obviously thought highly by many but sorry not for me. I am always keen to read new authors and genres but struggled to get into this book at all.

Tambu is living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare and anxious about her prospects after leaving a dead end job. Faced with humiliation and close to breaking point she takes an ecotourism job that forces her to return to her parents home.  

Parts of the book were enjoyable and many tough subjects are dealt with such as racism, violence against women and mental health but I found the reading hard work.

This book was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.

It is the third part of a trilogy – after the much read and studied (but I must confess new to me) “Nervous Conditions” (considered something of a classic of African literature) and the far more unheralded “The Book of Not”. I would suggest if possible to obtain both those books as well as this as the three books function as direct sequels to each other (each taking up where the previous volume left off).

The Book of Not finishes with the main character Tambu having lost her job (quitting after having had her work appropriated by a white, male colleague) and facing the imminent loss of her hostel accommodation (as the Matron makes it clear it is time for her to move on and sets her up for an interview with an old acquaintance). Tambu’s closing words ““So this evening I walked emptily to the room I would soon vacate, wondering what the future there was for me, a new Zimbabwean”

This book answers that question and the answer, particularly initially, is a bleak one.

Very much differently to the first two books (apart from the ending of “The Book of Not”) Tambu (the same driven and achieving Tambu that planted her own field of maize as a young child to try and pay her own school fees; and who later won a scholarship to the school’s most prestigious school where she then proceeded to get the best O’Level results) is effectively now both despondent and under-achieving – haunted by her past failures, blaming herself both for her A level performance (which bought her academic aspirations to a crashing halt) and her impulsive decision to quit her job.

The title of the book is taken from a Teju Cole New Yorker essay “Unmournable Bodies” one prompted by the Western reaction to the Charlie Hebdo killings which (among other things) effectively asked why only certain violent deaths are considered worthy of reaction.

The author of this novel has explained: "I extrapolated that question to living bodies. Basically I asked the question whether, if we could mourn the circumstance of certain living bodies we might not create a better world. At the same time those living bodies also need to mourn themselves in order to begin to heal and move forward …my observation has been that women often find it difficult to mourn themselves and their circumstances. In Zimbabwe today a lot of women think they are born to put up with all sorts of abuse, beginning in the families they are born into and equally in the families they marry into. It is the idea that society foists on women that suffering is a woman’s lot. …. Such women do not know how to mourn their circumstances. It’s a question of being allowed to grieve for yourself. One has to see oneself as worthy to be able to grieve about the negative things that happen to one. Grieving and mourning are active. You feel and you wade through the feelings. With depression one does not wade through but more or less drowns. Grieving and mourning, because they are active, pull one through, in spite of being terribly difficult. This, I think, is true whether one is grieving or mourning for oneself, or for someone else. I think that many Zimbabweans have not begun to mourn their situation actively yet. They are still denying it so as not to feel the pain."

And I think that quote explains much of the nature of this book. We (at least if we have read the first two books) know the real story behind both the A Levels and the advertising agency job – and can see that rather than grieving/mourning Tambu is effectively affected by depression. She does belatedly recognise the impact of racism and colonialism on her life (something her cousin Nyasha – like the second book, a much lesser presence her unfortunately than in the first book albeit with her backstory now even more clearly based on that of the author’s – Germany, filmmaker etc).

At the same time a wider past and shame haunts her in different ways: the violent past that lead to her sister losing a leg (in the unforgettable image that started the second book) and her family patriarch Uncle being accidentally paralysed; the role of various of her family members (particularly Aunt Lucia) in the liberation struggle; the poverty of her mother (as well as more unspoken in this book her terrible act of family betrayal). All issues she largely tried to ignore in the second book other than if she felt they threatened her ambitions to succeed in a white school.

All of this leads to a breakdown as she violently assaults a pupil in a teaching job she takes – not the first or last piece of behaviour by Tambu in this book which is at the same time harsh and exclusionary to others and self-destructive (another set piece sees her deliberately fail to come to the aid of a fellow hostel member being assaulted by a mob).

Tambu we have to conclude is suffering from what Sartre wrote in his introduction to Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” is a “a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among the colonized people with their consent.” – the quote which gave the title to the first book (in the second
book we see her consenting to this process).

The real narrative in the book only really starts when Tambu meets up with Tracey – her boss in her second job but also of course the person who inadvertently changes the course of Tambu’s life when she takes the honours for which Tambu has strived for such a period of time and on which she had based her entire future – and this leads to a series of scenes of an authentic holiday company which (slightly out of kilter with much of the book) verge on the satirical.

Another notable feature of the book is how it is written in the second person. But this is very much second person narration used as a different and more distanced way of conveying a first person viewpoint (the author has said “Often when we talk we use “you” when we mean “I”. So that was the sense in which I used it.”

The author attributes the second person to her not being able to face what Tambu was going through via the first person and feeling that readers (presumably those who had followed her through the first two books) would feel the same. At the same time it means we have less of a distance to Tambu than in the first two books – as we sit alongside her observing her life and behaviour.

Further, when the second book keep circling around the Shona concept of Unhu and particularly the greeting (which more signifies an entire worldview) “Tiripo, kana makadini wo!” (“I am well, if you are well too.”) and Tambu's difficulty in seeing how the concept applies in the new world she is entering: then the move from an "I" to a "you" narration takes on an added significance. What happens when someone cannot even care for their own wellness – when the “you” is the “I”.

The book is much more symbolic than the first two: a hyena reappears when Tambu’s grip on reality is least strong; a bag of mealie sent by her mother, one which she seems unable to either use of lose and one which gradually rots and decays both represents I think the burden of her shame at her village past (a shame which has almost physical impacts at times) and foreshadows the actions of her mother late in the book which end up forcing Tambu to repeat the actions of the second book and resign from a job.

Overall an intense and difficult end to an important trilogy.

The writing style flows beautifully,, it reaches out and brings you into the heart of the story. I was delighted to see this on the Booker long list and hope it's brought to a wider audience as a result

This Mournable Body is the third (and presumably final) book in the trilogy that Dangarembga kicked off way back in 1988 with Nervous Conditions - a recognised classic of African literature. Both books - and the unheralded second in the series The Book of Not - tell the story of Tambu, a Zimbabwean woman facing the challenges of life as a woman in post-colonial Zimbabwe.

In Nervous Conditions we saw teenage Tambu struggling with what it meant to be "benefitting" from a western education, and with being a girl in a firmly patriarchal society. In This Mournable Body, many years later, Tambudzai has adopted the grown-up longer form of her name. She still has some of the tenacity and drive that Tandu had in bucketloads, but the self-doubt has grown and a series of bad experiences has left her resentful and prone to occasional bouts of self-destructive behaviour.

The unusual decision to write in the second person represents this sense of life being something that happens to Tambudzai rather than something she any longer has control over. As a reader this takes a bit of adjustment, and it is harder to feel Tambudzai's feelings than in the first two novels, but it serves as a very effective way of conveying a protagonist distancing herself from her own story.

She may not come across as a sympathetic character - if likeability even matters? But the memory of Tambu the girl, surely one of the most compelling characters in all African literature, gives the struggles of adult Tambudzai a particularly profound sadness. If she is bitter, it is because racist and misogynist attitudes have slapped her down too many times.

As a series, there have been few (if any) more powerful expressions of the social, economic and psychological impacts of colonialism in Africa. We first saw the early years of the new Zimbabwe, where every challenge faced was balanced by a sense of hope. We now see the effects stretching even into the adult lives of those born in the dying days of white minority rule.

Nervous Conditions has stayed with me ever since I first read it twenty years ago. This Mournable Body will surely do the same.

I found this an uneven and difficult novel that has important things to contemplate and say and yet which is also somewhat difficult to read. What I like is the way the language is alight with the cadences of (I'm presuming here) Zimbabwean English: there's a linguistic energy that counters the depressed state of the narrator which keeps some kind of momentum in play. I also think the 2nd person 'you' works well to convey the self-alienated state of the narrator.

The material is fascinating as, with a light touch, it sketches in the history of Zimbabwe and makes our narrator a kind of stand-in for the country: once young, buoyant, optimistic and determined to overcome the vagaries of history and colonial exploitation to create a self-autonomy and self-determined destiny; now jaded, older if not wiser, close to collapse, betrayed by both 'culture' and her own self, too easily turning to violence, exploitation and betrayal herself. An early scene that takes place between a housemate and a bus driver is profoundly shocking, as is our narrator's participation in it. And the book culminates in a kind of blacker-than-black satire/comedy-horror as we see female bodies treated as mere tourist souvenirs, objects for a form of capitalist entertainment that reimposes colonialist structures.

Yet, for all this good stuff, I found the writing disjointed and often over-written: 'now squeezing into [a skirt] is a major assault on the pachyderm. The zip bites at your skin with treacherous teeth'; 'sweat runs down your face. It slithers into your eyes. It gushes out of your armpits mingled with antiperspirant'.

I can see why this is on the Booker longlist and especially like the way the unlikeable anti-heroine is also made to be someone with whom we can empathise: perhaps we are able to mourn for her body, traumatised in so many not always seen ways, even if she herself cannot.