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This Mournable Body

A Novel

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This Mournable Body

By: Tsitsi Dangarembga
Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
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Summary

Anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai finds herself living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. For reasons that include her grim financial prospects and her age, she moves to a widow's boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.

In This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga returns to the protagonist of her acclaimed first novel, Nervous Conditions, to examine how the hope and potential of a young girl and a fledgling nation can sour over time and become a bitter and floundering struggle for survival.

As a last resort, Tambudzai takes an ecotourism job that forces her to return to her parents' impoverished homestead. It is this homecoming, in Dangarembga's tense and psychologically charged novel, that culminates in an act of betrayal, revealing just how toxic the combination of colonialism and capitalism can be.

©2018 Tsitsi Dangarembga (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction Africa
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Would've been enjoyable if narrator pronounced the Shona words &sing it better this disappointed readers

Great overview of life in post colonial Harare

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Why no Zimbabwean narrator?.. As per first novel.. Otherwise good book.. Still listenable but many local words mispronounced

Good follow on..

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I skipped book 2 when I noticed the same reader from book 1 was going to narrate it. Now I love Adenrele Ojo narration and have listened to several books she has narrated. My biggest criticism now is that this author simply has no desire to have her books read by a true native Shona speakers. I do not know what to make of this but find irony where pride should have been. No language deserves to be butchered like this.

Disappointed

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Like the listener above, I am disappointed with the narration. Chipo Chung did a great job of the previous two books so why choose an American reader whose accent makes all characters sound the same - and none of them Zimbabwean? I am returning it and will buy the physical book to find out the rest of Tambudzau’s story.

Wrong reader

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I can't understand why an author of the stature of Tsitsi Dangarembga should have her character voiced in an American accent. This is not a translation, but a book set in a country where English is an official language. I'm sure Americans would be annoyed if they bought an audiobook of Catcher in the Rye only to discover it was narrated with a British accent, or the Great Gatsby in an Aussie twang.

This is not to say that the narrator mightn't do a great job with another book. It just feels completely disrespectful to the author and fellow Zimbabweans, and Africans altogether, to have made this very poor and inappropriate choice. I just can't listen to it without wondering how this is still happening when we've had months of introspection over Black Lives Matter. It really should be re-recorded.

Superb book ruined by inappropriate accent

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