Reviews
Fiction rarely reveals the emotional realities behind the latest news headlines. But Petina Gappah’s An Elegy for Easterly does just that. The collection of 13 stories offers a moving and disturbing portrait of contemporary Zimbabwe. The difficulties of life under President Mugabe – insane inflation, cholera outbreaks, an Aids epidemic – are brought painfully to life. All of Gappah’s characters are caught up in politics – from the compromised widow in “At the Sound of the Last Post”, who has to be bribed to stand next to Mugabe at her husband’s funeral, to the insurance salesman turned trillion-dollar black market trader in “Midnight at the Hotel California”. Gappah’s tone is poignant and tender throughout. There are even flashes of wry humour, such as in “Something Nice from London”, when a young woman returning from the UK presents her struggling family with a tray decorated with English monarchs.
Melissa McClements, The Financial Times
Gappah plays with point of view to suggest that none of her characters is simply good or evil – not even Mugabe. Gappah's language is clean and crisp, with a musical quality that frequently draws on her first language, Shona. An Elegy for Easterly is a powerful debut from a fresh voice, with themes – from disappointment and betrayal to promise and love – that will resonate with readers everywhere.
Susan Williams, The Independent
More and more I have come to admire resilience," begins the epigraph, a poem by Jane Hirshfield. Yet sometimes laughter is the only form of resilience Petina Gappah's characters can manage, and it is the frequent humour in these stories that makes them remarkable, even if their outcomes can be tragic. Often satirical, occasionally lyrical, they are a delight.
Tom Fleming, The Observer, 19 April 2009
From the outset, Gappah shows herself to be a mistress of crushing ironies and acerbic humour (“In the days before a loaf of bread cost half a million dollars, 100 cents made one dollar”), so by the time we come to the tale Something Nice from London, we know that the family interminably awaiting the return of a relative’s body at the airport is on a hiding to hell. Barely a word of the author’s pithy prose is wasted, and although her economical style can sacrifice immediacy and intimacy, this remains a fiercely indignant, justly cynical and bravely unflinching work.
Trevor Lewis, The Times
When Rambanai returns to Zimbabwe after five years in America, she finds the country barely recognisable. Inflation is astronomical, elections have been rigged and the country groans under dictatorship. But what most shocks her is that “There are flies at the Italian Bakery. Flies, imagine. I was so upset.” This observation says more about the disillusion of Zimbabweans than a thousand statistics. Petina Gappah’s debut is good on the details... Death haunts the book as it does Zimbabwe. Gappah strives to remain detached, but her anger can make this collection rather one note. The ordinary difficulties of life, about which she writes so well, are overshadowed by her nation’s spectacular collapse.
The collection’s wide scope takes in past and present (Rhodesia, Zimbabwe); people and place (the cousin returning from America, the diplomatic assistant in Geneva falling foul of an email scam); the newsworthy and the trivial (the burial of a ruling party chief, a marital argument), all of it laced with deliciously dark comic undertones.
Eachan Johnson, The Oxonian Review
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
An Elegy for Easterly: Stories Petina Gappah, Faber and Faber, ISBN 978-0-86547-906-7
In her accomplished debut, Gappah, a Zimbabwean writer and international trade lawyer, casts her compassionate eye on a diverse array of characters living, grieving, loving—and fighting to survive—under Robert Mugabe's regime. “In the Heart of the Golden Triangle,” the second-person narrative of a wealthy woman's tormented marriage, turns a mirror upon the reader: “You worry because you have not found condoms in his pockets,” the narrator muses of her husband's behavior, “but in the cushioned comfort of your four-by-four, you don't feel a thing.” Meanwhile, in “The Cracked, Pink Lips of Rosie's Bridegroom,” a village ponders a doomed marriage in which the groom, who has a history of “buried... girlfriends,” is clearly marked as being afflicted by “the big disease with the little name.” In “The Mupandawana Dancing Champion,” Gappah sets her sights on political absurdities with a cutting story about a coffin maker with some great dance moves and an unfortunate nickname. Gappah's deep well of empathy and saber-sharp command of satire give her collection a surplus of heart and verve. (June)
Petina Gappah ... is without a doubt, a master of the short story ... [Her] stories plumb rejection, indifference and deprivation. The fear of AIDS flits lithely through these pages. As a snapshot of marriage, The Negotiated Settlement could have been taken anywhere in the world from Brisbane to Cairo. In The Maid from Lalapanzi will probably be found the dog with the longest name in the world (They shot into the air to frighten people, and when her grandmother’s dog Pfungwadzebenzi barked, a guerrilla shot him in the stomach and he limped off to the forest to die). It is not the dog that stays with the reader afterwards though, but the sadness of a war that continues to harvest its human victims years and years after the last shot was fired.
Enter, ZimbaBwana: A Review of Harare North and An Elegy for Easterly, African Writing 7, April 2009
Gappah's storytelling draws on a fine tradition that will no doubt be tirelessly compared to the likes of Chinua Achebe, though a less obvious and slightly more accurate comparison might be found with the folksy charm of Zora Neale Hurston. Like Hurston, Gappah is able to invest in all her characters a vim and vitality that bursts from the page while also expressing the frustration and despondency of a class of people unable to rule their own destiny. Most importantly, she makes each short tale feel more like a brief lesson in life. What is perhaps most compelling and important about Elegy for Easterly is that it can speak to us all. With this collection she has produced a painful and powerful vision of a nation throughout its stages of anticipation and agony, while reminding us all that the pictures we see on news screens are not quite as distant and irrelevant as we might sometimes imagine.
Stephen Jones, Politics.co.uk
Though Gappah's characters run the gamut of class from super-wealthy to destitute, she is at her best in her depiction of ordinary people, their ambitions and dreams of a better life even as everything around them crumbles. Through humour and compassion, she depicts that most quintessential of African characteristics: the ability to laugh at life, for fear of crying.
Aminatta Forna, The Guardian, 25 April 2009
"... has a wild, cracked gallows humour reminiscent of Chekhov's peasant stories."
James Lasdun, writing in The Guardian
Want to score points for introducing your book group to a stunning new writer? Put Petina Gappah on your list. Petina who grew up in Zimbabwe and now works as a lawyer in Geneva, has a blessed talent for short story writing (her novel comes out here next year). Her lyrically powered tales are blistered with the realities of living in a country haunted by untruths, dispossession, war legacies and mad hyper-inflation, where a load of bread costs millions of Zimdollars. The rhythmic storytelling is matched with searing insight and acuity. Be prepared: each story leaves you short of breath as you reflect on the bigger picture.
Good Housekeeping, May 2009
These stories from a morally and financially bankrupt Zimbabwe are shocking, compellingly readable and, ocassionally, grimly funny.
Psychologies, May 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.
Andrew Blackman, author of On The Holloway Road
An Elegy for Easterly, written by Petina Gappah, is a collection of powerfully moving stories that give voice to the realities of life in Zimbabwe now and in the recent past.What’s it really like to live under the rule of Robert Mugabe? Petina Gappah tells individual stories, each with a perspective of its own, to create a collage of life in Zimbabwe and the people who live there.
Cindy Moritz, All4women.co.za
With the tenderness of an exile forced to watch the destruction of the land she loves, Petina Gappah writes about the everyday lives of ordinary people in her beleaguered homeland of Zimbabwe. These eloquent and moving stories are about the ordinary disappointments of life as well the powerlessness of an oppressed people in corrupt times.
Susan Osborne, Waterstones' BooksQuarterly