5 out of 5
by
Andrew
from
London, London, The United Kingdom | Apr 13, 2009
This debut short-story collection by Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah is a wonderful read. The tone of each one is perfect: the language is consistently beautiful but also completely natural. You get to know the characters very quickly, through small details artfully described, and are left at just the right moment to move on to the next tale.
The title gives a clue to what's in store. "Elegy" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "A song of lamentation, esp. a funeral song or lament for the dead". This book feels like Petina Gappah's lament for the Zimbabwe she grew up in, a Zimbabwe that has been scarred by political corruption, economic chaos and the scourge of AIDS. I can't say whether she means to say that the Zimbabwe she knew is dead. Of course the country endures, the people endure, and that's what these stories are about. Perhaps the lament is not so much for the country itself as for the people who have suffered so much. In any case, there's a deep sadness underlying all these stories, and there's a death or a funeral in most of the stories.
Yet the strange thing is that there's also a lot of humour, and the humour often goes hand-in-hand with the sadness. There's the old carpenter who is cheated out of his pension and wins a dancing contest, the diplomat who is new to email and loses thousands of euros to the old lottery scam, and the bizarre goings-on at the Hotel California. In many of the stories, the humour is very real and genuinely funny, and yet it feels like a thin veneer which Gappah deliberately lets slip every now and then, exposing the horror underneath.
My favourite story, though, has no real humour. It's called 'Something Nice from London' and tells of a family waiting at the airport for the twice-weekly flight from London. The title refers to the hope that relatives in the UK will either return or send back money or gifts for their families. With the collapse of the economy, a few UK pounds is millions of Zimbabwe dollars, and can help a family to survive. But it gradually becomes clear that what this particular family is waiting for is the coffin of their son, Peter. And what follows is a tragic, drawn-out description of the anxious waiting for weeks and weeks, interspersed with explanations of what brought Peter and the family to this point, all the sacrifices and mistakes and disappointments. It's important that the body returns because the whole extended family is staying at their house awaiting the funeral, and they literally can't afford to feed them much longer.
It's probably not a representative story to pick - the others, as I said, had more humour mixed in with the tragedy, and I think it's that mixture that makes the book successful. But this particular story really got to me more than all the others. There's just a real power to that image of the family waiting at the airport, surrounded by all the other people waiting for 'Something nice from London' while they are waiting for the coffin of their son.
Which brings me back to the tone. When describing suffering, and especially when interspersing it with humour, there are a lot of pitfalls to avoid: melodrama, tastelessness, didacticism and exploitation to name but a few. Gappah skips effortlessly through the minefield, achieving just the right tone in every story. It's a tremendous achievement, and I look forward to reading more from her.
2 people found this review helpful
3 out of 5
by
Dan
from
Tucson, AZ | Dec 20, 2009
I liked these stories separately and together. Almost all are set in the Zimbabwe of the dictator Robert Mugabe, sometimes with a minor backstory from the time of the guerrilla war. In the one story set outside Zimbabwe, a Zimbabwean man whose life and understanding are constrained by the various kinds of poverty he brings with him from Zimbabwe tries to cope in Europe but is betrayed by his own limitations and by other Africans. Readers will see the latter kind of understated, almost hidden, betrayal again, part of Gappah’s talent and her confidence in the reader’s empathy and sense of irony.
One of the pleasures of reading fiction is your encounter with different customs and attitudes–even though they are based on feelings that are not so different from those we know at home. As you’d expect, that is one of the pleasures for an American reading these stories. But though Gappah is a Zimbabwean she is a citizen of a much larger world. She is in touch with the grit, but she's a sophisticated citizen of the world who works in Geneva and holds a law degree from Cambridge. So she when she writes about Zimbabwe, she has the perspective of binocular vision.
On the other hand, the universals of human feeling and problems are the core of these stories. Beyond that, though, it is striking to me how very many of the details, including the flaws and outrages of dictatorship, are very much like our own. In "The Mupandawana Dancing Champion," a character tells a joke about Zimbabwe supporters of the ruling elite who appears at the Pearly Gates asking admission to Heaven. St. Peter is taken aback and runs to see God about whether to admit them. God say that even the those of the elite are His children, whereupon St. Peter goes back to the gates, then returns to God–"They've gone!" he tells God. "How can all those people disappear?" God asks. "No," says Peter, "the Pearly Gates are gone!"
If that doesn't sound to you like a story that could be told about Western politicians, you haven't been reading the newspapers. In the same story, the main character, about to retire, learns that his employer has used his pension money elsewhere and is now going out of business, leaving the employee two pair of ill-fitting shoes instead of a pension. As happens in America, too, because Congress in inviting employers to set up pension plans provided zero security for the money. Maybe you've heard of Enron, too, selling stock in its fraudulent and crumbling empire to–guess what, its own employees' pension funds?
Almost all of the stories explicitly or implicitly consider the effects of power (of the state, of large social institutions, of employers) on individuals, even if the dictatorship's abuse is secondary in many stories. The first three stories especially pursue the themes of power vs. its victims. But as formally simple as most of these stories are, they are not simple good guys against bad guys. The powerless victim may after all find a way to strike back. Or may turn against other powerless people. I'd like to say more about this, but resist and stick with abstractions to avoid spoliation.
As important as victimizers are in some of the stories, virtually all the stories are precisely focused on the relationships of particular human individuals--their growth, their disintegration, their ongoingness and sometimes renewal. Sometimes the power abuse is simply part of the background, like the kind of cigarettes characters smoke, and the real story is about the human beings, particularly in their relationships with one another. At other times, Gappah integrates the story of power with the story of individual relationships.
The relationship issues are often the universal and simple ones–the husband regularly "cheats" (Gappah's word) on his wife, a man makes his way in the straitened economy of inflation by dealing in the black market; a young woman tries to get free of a "mental" ward– and all its associations; parents exaggerate their children's accomplishments abroad and use the supposed accomplishment as offensive weapons; young people build a destructive fantasy life or they go abroad and find themselves too innocent to cope well with life in Dallas or Geneva.
Some stories are told in the first person, others in the third. There is even one told in the second person, a rarity, but it works. The first person narrator is sometimes a male, though more often a female. She writes in the present tense and in the past. In other words, on these elements, the stories are varied.
Varied but in a way quite simple in style. No big puzzles here for the reader. "What does that pear tree symbolize?" is not the kind of question you have to figure out. But simplicity is not shallowness here. And I, at least, found myself thinking back about stories, not to figure out puzzles set by the author but to get a better feeling for the depth. I'll probably re-read some of them, something I almost never do without an interval of 30 years.
Dialog may be Gappah's best suit, but her narration, even when it becomes just "telling," holds you. Sometimes the telling is a bit too summary and in one instance the piece is not, in my view, a short story at all, but rather effective social commentary without a story. The main character in the "Cracked Pink Lips of Rosie's Bridegroom," is a collective–the guests at a wedding who believe they observe symptoms of HIV in the groom. The individuals getting married here are not explored; they are more like Muller's ghostly characters in Green Plums. Even as a piece of social commentary, I felt this piece lost something because the author's outrage at HIV/AIDs and at its wanton devastations of women by men who marry them seems to be redirected in the end–at the character of the wedding guests who are commenting on it. If you are going to attack everyone at once, you may need a novel, not a short story.
To the extent that these stories implicate the theme of the state vs. the individual, or develop the day to day life in a dictatorship, Elegy suggests many comparisons or contrasts. I recently read Herta Muller's Land of the Green Plums, another book that deals with an economically ruinous dictatorship (Ceausescu in Romania). But the whole feel of Muller's book is surreal. In Gappah, the title story, "Elegy for Easterly," is a powerful tale of life in the Zimbabwe, seen from the life of a few individuals. Muller's characters had almost been turned into ghosts, by the regime or perhaps through their own flaws, but in either case they are visible to us mostly in outline. Gappah's are vivid even in their quotidian lives. Sometimes I wanted more of the characters. Maybe Gappah know how to quit when she's ahead, or maybe that's my love of the longer forms of fiction.
Another dimension: it might be instructive to see these stories in the context of modern African literature, particularly literature written in English. This is beyond my knowledge. However, Gappah has been quoted on the web and maybe elsewhere as saying she doesn't think of herself as an African writer and this has prompted some discussion among writers who are, in some sense, "African." An interesting blog by Chielo Zona Eze, a Nigerian writer teaching in Chicago, gave me an introduction to this topic. He sees two schools of thought among writers with roots in Africa. One, growing out of Achebe (who attacked Conrad's Heart of Darkness as essentially racist) "sees its role as primarily redefining the African," challenging the West's "single story." The other, based on Soyinka, cares "little about the burden of meeting the gaze of the white man." I'd guess Gappah goes this group if classifying her is deemed important. Eze sees her as "confronting life rather than in defining herself." http://africanliteraturenews.blogspot.co... (visited December 17, 2009).
However you might classify her on the "African" spectrum, it would be unfair to suggest that Zimbabweans are, to her, "the other." They are part of her, and if you read the stories, I don't see how you could think otherwise. She does not turn her back on Zimbabwe or its cultures. She doesn't see Mugabe as a representative of some permanent flaw in Zimbabwean culture and she cannot be accused of showing Zimbabwe as somehow inferior, though its suffering is great. In other words, Gappah is not the outsider like Conrad writing Heart of Darkness. You really can’t avoid thinking that she has a sense of individual human beings that do not merely stand for something else but are themselves. That's what makes her a fiction writer and not a polemicist or philosopher.
1 people found this review helpful
4 out of 5
by
Tania
from
Israel | Jul 10, 2009
There are those who write fiction in order to educate, to say "This is how things are done, this is what you must know, read and learn". But in my opinion, education is not the primary aim of fiction. Fiction must, above all, bring the reader a gripping story, characters that we want to follow, to see what happens to them. This is where Petina Gappah excels: first and foremost, she tells great stories, and, almost incidentally, we learn as we read. We learn about Zimbabwe, the rhythms of its language, the corruption of its politics, the AIDS epidemic, the relations between neighbours and friends, between rich and poor, between Africa and the rest of the world, between parents and their children. These stories are full of atmosphere, of cultural detail, and we drink it in, because we are so taken with the story and the characters. Gappah has hooked us....
Read the rest of my review on The Short Review.