With a poetic flair for transforming the earthly into the surreal, the critically acclaimed Vera sets out in these two chaotic novellas to describe life during Zimbabwe's civil war in the late 1970s. Cadence and enigmatic descriptions are her obsessions; characters and plot are not. As a result, the cracked earth is more palpable than the bristling of Vera's displaced heroines, and her stilted and superfluous ruminations eclipse what are otherwise intriguing themes. In Without a Name, young and fiercely independent Mazvita sets out from her small village for the city of Harare to escape her brutal memories of the war. She cannot find work and soon grows dependent on her quasi love interest, Joel. Pregnancy follows. And when the baby arrives prematurely, Mazvita, hampered by a lingering malaise, neglects to name it. The rest of the story sifts through conflicting emotions of love, scorn, shame and alienation. Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Under the Tongue
chronicles adolescent Zhizha's search for identity through a complicated relationship with her family. The tongue-tied girl cryptically reveals her family's secrets—why she has come to embrace her grandmother as her mother; why her mother has been jailed; how her father has died. Zhizha is caught between the desire to remember and to forget. Again, the characters are amorphous and often seem merely vehicles for language that would be better suited to a volume of poetry than a work of fiction. These stark tales explore the painful scars left by incest, murder, dislocation and war, but their emphasis on phantasmagoric imagery and failure to make characters more than a reflection of their circumstances leaves their potential power largely untapped. (Feb.)
