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A review by sisa_moyo
Inside Harare Alcatraz and Other Short Stories by Andrew Chatora
This stories explore the black Zimbabwean experience within the country and those of the diaspora in the UK as immigrants.
I struggled to get through this book even with it being so short. First, I was jarred by the dialogue, most of which did not sound natural or conversational at all. For me, it did not read like how people speak or would speak given their age, where they were from - it didn’t feel localised. Additionally a lot of the phrases, and paragraphs were quite repetitive in a way that would kill the flow of a sentence or make the story boring to read through.
I was also not engaged by the stories the author writes from women’s perspectives which were mostly of a sexual nature. I found that one of my favourite stories while it was about/ centred around women was not from within their point of view but from a teenage boy looking into these lives. The shift to writing from the perspective of women and their subsequent portrayal personally irked me.
While I resonated with the themes of the stories and found the messages worthwhile, the execution, in Chatora’s writing style doesn’t leave the message to the subtext and repeats issues with a single story, was not for me. There was a lot of telling not showing, half of the stories felt unlike fiction laced with the relevant themes and more like news articles or manifestos for columns or blog posts.
I struggled to get through this book even with it being so short. First, I was jarred by the dialogue, most of which did not sound natural or conversational at all. For me, it did not read like how people speak or would speak given their age, where they were from - it didn’t feel localised. Additionally a lot of the phrases, and paragraphs were quite repetitive in a way that would kill the flow of a sentence or make the story boring to read through.
I was also not engaged by the stories the author writes from women’s perspectives which were mostly of a sexual nature. I found that one of my favourite stories while it was about/ centred around women was not from within their point of view but from a teenage boy looking into these lives. The shift to writing from the perspective of women and their subsequent portrayal personally irked me.
While I resonated with the themes of the stories and found the messages worthwhile, the execution, in Chatora’s writing style doesn’t leave the message to the subtext and repeats issues with a single story, was not for me. There was a lot of telling not showing, half of the stories felt unlike fiction laced with the relevant themes and more like news articles or manifestos for columns or blog posts.