Reviews

House of Stone by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

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nini23's review

I find it difficult to take an author's writing seriously when he writes cringeworthy lines like these:

Her breasts jiggled under her exquisite collarbone. He wondered if they were soft and mushy like the inside of an over-ripe pawpaw, or lumpy like the inside of a granadilla.

He chased after her as one pursues conquest. No, he did not want to forage towns, cities and countries. It was the soft hills of her breasts he longed to scale, the mountains of her buttocks he longed to conquer.

[As a Public Service Announcement, if one has numerous lumps in the breast, please go for regular breast cancer screening. One in eight women will get breast cancer in their lifetime. Early detection is vital.]

sophielucy's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

burritapal_1's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Black Jesus:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perrance_Shiri

I pictured Black Jesus as a handsome black man with shoulder length, black curly hair. I looked up Black Jesus Zimbabwe on google, and the images show a black man far from looking like this.

This author is very clever. I spent so much of the book scratching my head trying to figure out what Zamani was about, why didn't he have to go to a job every day? Why was he so intent on making Mama Agnes and Abednego his Surrogate mother and father? Well, one does figure it out, but it takes a while. For being a first book, what a brilliant job.

Zamani is trying to ingratiate himself into the Mlambo family, who has taken over his Uncle Fani's house.

When he came back from working in London, and went to the house where he had lived with his deceased Uncle Fani, he found someone else living there. The Mlambos had apparently been sold the house. Zamani goes to the title office, and is shown a receipt of sale by a man whose name Zamani recognizes as that of a former neighbor. There's nothing he can do about this, but Zamani will have his revenge. For the time being, He rents a little Shack in the back of the house.

Shortly after Zamani moves into the backyard shack, Bukhosi disappears, and his parents are in an agony. Abednego takes a year's leave of absence from his job to post flyers around the town and look for him.

To help achieve his revenge, though the reader doesn't yet understand what he's doing, Zamani gives his surrogate father whiskey and opium. This, he figures, is how he'll learn the family hi-story, as he calls it, and allow him to write his own hi-story, as his own was erased by Black Jesus and the Gukuruhundi.

At one point his surrogate father is very drunk, and mistakes him for his disappeared son Bukhosu. He begins to tell Zamani how in his village his family was perceived as Traitors because of his father, who had served in World War II on behalf of Rhodesia. Zamani tells his "Baba"...

"... what are honor and Duty and Country except the Trinity of a live, moving hearse into which we throw Conquest's history-riddled bodies? What do you suppose those soldiers of the Schutzstaffel told themselves as they flung in the name of honor and Duty and Country Jewish bodies, warm and breathing still, into the furnace is at Treblinka? What do you suppose the founders of the US of A were thinking as they wiped out whole Native American populations? And those soldiers of our own Mugabe's 5 Brigade, what do you suppose ran through their minds as they hacked and hacked our people to death in Matabeleland during Gukurahundi? I imagine they all saw themselves as ordinary men, just men and even boys who had mothers and lovers waiting somewhere with rose-scented memories bosomed in their chests.' "

On the night when the independence of the newly-named Zimbabwe is celebrated in a stadium in Harare, ...

" o Thursday night giddy with swaying crowds and freedom curdled like sweetened amasi and heady scents of flowers mingling in the heat! At around 10:00 p.m., Bob Marley clambered up onto the stage at Rufaro Stadium with the Wailers, and shouted into the mic, 'Viva Zimbabwe!'

The crowds outside, high on the Opium of independence, began to press against the gates, trying to get in. those inside, propelled by this force, moved towards the stage. Abednego felt Thandi's [his first wife, who was killed at Gukurahundi] moist hand slipping from his. He fired her name into the surge, lifting his boy [ his first son Bukhosi] from his shoulders and pressing him to his chest. But her face was lost in the wave of euphoria that tided the masses towards Bob Marley.

The police, overcome by fear, slipped into animated violence like a second skin; they began whacking the people with their batons, and the people wailed, so that their independence brimmed over into the night into a collective howl.

The VIPs, penned in their elevated stand, were caught by the cameras in what was later proclaimed as joyous weeping, overwhelming emotions at this monu-mentous day, this emancipation of the black-and-brown peoples of the House of Stone... but, in fact, the overzealous policemen, in a state of frenzy, had flung tear gas cans whichever way, including at the cordoned-off stand, much to the Very Important People's pompous Chagrin.... "

The two-faced Zamani pretends to have located the disappeared Bukhosi on Facebook. His charade is perpetuated by keeping the legend of Bukhosi alive. He goes to an internet cafe and makes a fake account for Bukhosi, and shows Abednego and Mama Agnes the messages that their son writes to Zamani, who has "befriended" him. He says he has gone to South Africa and that he will be home for Christmas.

The reader learns that Zamani was with Bukhosi when they were in a rally in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, in 2007. Rallyers were protesting, wanting a secessionist state for the people who make up the majority, Ndebele speakers. They would call this Republic Mthwakazi, After a pre-colonial kingdom.

When the police showed up at the rally, Zamani grabbed Bukhosi (who, by the way, was wearing an Mthwakazi t-shirt) and they went running. They hid in some bushes, but when a cop walked by, Zamani pushed Bukhosi out from under the bushes under the feet of the officer. That was basically the end of Bukhosi. But Zamani does not Enlighten Bukhosi's parents to his whereabouts, not until the very end of the book.

Since Robert Mugabe's (Black Jesus) government 's massacre of the Ndebele people in 1983, this revolt has been simmering in the planning.

The book circled around this unforgettable event in the young nation's history. The name Gukurahundi is given to this massacre, which translates to "the early rain that washes away the chaff before the spring shoots."

Zamani's mother is gang-raped, starting with Black Jesus, on this bloody night, and then brutally murdered, and he puts together these puzzle pieces, learning of his conception. Mama Agnes was with this group of young women, and Zamani repeatedly tries to get her to talk about it, trying to learn something of his mother, but she shudders with the remembrance and refuses.

The reader is educated, which this reader appreciated, since of couse the imperialistic power does not inform schoolchildren of massively important events like this, in the history of Zimbabwe, starting with when the Englishman Cecil Rhodes arrived and named it Rhodesia. The Ndebele King Lobengula and Queen Lozikeyi are vanished by his government, and another Englishman, Ian Smith, is installed as Prime Minister.

I should have known that the Reverend Pastor Reuben wasn't the holy man that he pretended to be and that Mama Agnes revered so:

"as any Discerning soul will have already guessed, Reverend Pastor Reuben is that same Father Reuben who took Mama Agnes's virginity all those years ago when she was but a lassie. I spent the afternoon online doing due diligence on him, this man from my Mama Agnes's youth who is back in her life playing the role of Father. The things I found out about him! He was kicked out of the Catholic order several years ago after it emerged that he had long since been submerged in sin, plugging his joystick into many a female outlet and spasming with electric bliss. His proclivity had been for the married woman; he may have even blessed a man's house or two with child. But then, having since repented, he started his own church, Blessed Anointings, after the charismatic Pentecostal fashion, and made it his business to preach not only about the sins of the government but also those of the Catholic Church, which, he now claims, has always been a little too concerned with matters of this world rather than the next."

Abednego is a wife-beater, and Zamani comforts her after her husband has beaten her, taking advantage of these beatings to get more information about Bhalagwe, where she and (certainly) his own mother were taken during Gukurahundi and raped and (his mother) killed.

She has been telling Zamani about the time that he (Abednego) took her to the Rainbow Hotel when Abednego ordered her a steak that was so Raw it was bleeding all over her plate and he forced her, retching, to eat it, and then when they arrived home he beat her bloody.

"she had never questioned his love for her, nor hers for him, for, as everyone well knew, husbands love their wives and wives had to find ingratiating ways of loving their husbands. She believed he loved her, in his own way. He was remorseful for these intermittent beatings, she was sure, though she never understood their source, such was their arbitrariness; had she known what triggered them she would have at least tried to abate them. And though he never acknowledged them or said out loud that he was sorry, he showed his remorse, and his love, by bringing her gifts, like the box he came lugging home one cold June day whose contents, once he had plugged it in and hit the switch, transformed her world into a Carrollian Wonderland."

Hmmm, This reminds me of someone I know. The beatings, the never saying you're sorry, and then the gifts.

As the reader gets near the end of the book (page 359), she understands bit by bit what Zamani is doing in this house and how he has arrived there. Zamani had been involved in a movement that wanted to make the southwestern part of Zimbabwe for Ndebele people. But Black Jesus wasn't having this, and made sure that those involved, when arrested, disappeared.

Zamani, who had gone to London after his Uncle Fani died, to earn money as a caretaker, met Dumo, the leader of this movement in London. But Dumo was not very smart, As Leaders go. Also, Zamani was angry at Dumo for taking Bukhosi into his bosom, after Zamani had done so much for him.

"I I I! I Who brought Bukhosi to him, so he could find the answers his own father couldn't give him. How was I to know they would start seeing each other outside of our tripartite meetings? That the boy, overbrimming with juvenile passions, would take to Dumo like a fanatic? It's clear to me that it was this that Dumo had wanted all along; someone enthralled to him, malleable to his ideas, not someone like me, who questioned him, and who pushed for our Mthwakazi idea to be a new era in the lives of our people, rather than a repetition of the old.

the match lit when i, in true Ironist fashion, asked Dumo what he thought he was doing when he accepted money from a neoliberal outfit based overseas, and which it was evident would, once it came to collect all those promises of Mining rights and business contracts and what not, derail our plans for a socially Democratic Mthwakazi Republic. He laughed, Dumo, that deriding laugh he had taken on especially with me of late, and told me to stop being stupid, there was a time for ideology and a time for practicality, and he had to make things work under imperfect conditions, kind of like when they first taught you at school that 1-2= it can't, and then later they told you that no, actually, it can!"

Brilliant work by this author.

mnatale100's review

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challenging dark emotional informative mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

gathonik's review

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4.0

The whole time I was reading this I kept thinking of that movieThe Talented Mr. Ripley. But that doesn't take away from the brilliance that is the story and the characters. You'd think the book is your usual African revolution story but it isn't. It's a fascinating thriller and I really enjoyed it. The ending gutted me though!

mmefish's review against another edition

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challenging dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.0

This felt like two different books with two different ideas behind them put into one; a phycological thriller and a historical novel mismatch. The concept is ambitious but I don't think the execution is strong enough.

I don't understand the reasoning behind writing a psychopath of a character that is Zamani, can't understand why we have to follow the events of the book through his eyes, read about his thoughts, his made-up scenarios. The "revelations" of the last chapters are not revelations at all—it's easy to guess what exactly happened by much earlier in the book—and so the invention of his character makes for a weird choice (serving what purpose exactly?), keeping in mind what the other half of the novel talks about.

And the other half is this: Zimbabwean genocide; the (separate) lives and griefs of a married couple.

But because the book spends too much time on Zamani, all of that painful imagery, all that history kind of gets brushed aside at the end – unfinished, perfunctory, forgotten. Maybe that's exactly the point but again, the way the novel deliveres it confused me.

Content Warnings

cgreenstein's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

Recent Zimbabwean history as told through the eyes of a narrator whose increasingly predatory search for belonging serves as a metaphor for the nation and its different ethnic groups.

Content Warnings

binstonbirchill's review against another edition

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5.0

It took me a little while (probably 70 pages) to get comfortable with the surroundings and characters but once settled in I felt like the storytelling grew and grew. Undoubtedly it was there the whole time and I just took a bit to get up to speed. The story jumps back and forth in time through the eyes of our young protagonist who is searching for his identity, clearly a stand in for the nation as a whole. The connection between past and present is everywhere, from the familial violence to lost loved ones, to betrayals and tragedy. I came by this through This Mournable Body and I feel that both are intense and well worth a read, probably not back to bad though as both are rather devastating to read.

miller_k_e_'s review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious slow-paced

3.25

quinnjuliac's review

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adventurous challenging dark tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I’m glad I stuck with this book although the first 1/3 of it was challenging. The narrator is very unreliable and the tale is quite meandering, but throughout the book it becomes clear what is being intentionally concealed from vs revealed to the reader. The book gave really vivid insight into the range of traumas the people of Zimbabwe have experienced over the last 50 years and how their traumas impact their relationships and families and are passed on through generations. I kind of had to resolve to stick with this book as it wasn’t clear where it was going to go for a lot of the time. In summary I’m glad I read it. Holy content warning!! Watch out if you struggle with violence or genocide.

Content Warnings

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