Book Club - Looking for a book recommendation?

Hello lovely people! I just love the diversity and international flavours that come through the Pilates Core Club book club. This month’s book is by a Zimbabwean author and was chosen by our own Zimbabwean member, Tiny. All very apt as the international women of the island have just been celebrated by Guernsey’s Lieutenant Governor. We are so much richer with a greater understanding of different cultures and views.

Tiny and Maz after our Book Club meeting.

The Book of Memory - Petina Gappah

This book was chosen by a Zimbabwean member of our bookclub.  The heart of the book being focused upon the reliability of memory led us into an animated discussion of memory; examples of its misinterpretation, misjudgement, and misunderstandings.  

Memory, a highly educated heroine/ narrator, has led a peripatetic existence, features which help her to survive her prison cell. We warmed to her rye, optimistic, bouncy personality.  In spite of being on death row, she sees the funny side of prison goings on, finding humour in even the darkest of places.  A journalist has  required her to write an account of her life up to this point.  This allows her to remember, rethink and find the truth about past events.  The setting gives her space to contemplate and make sense of her past.

Through the prison bars and the cut up pieces of newspaper we are given glimpses of what is happening in Zimbabwe.  In fact, we felt that Memory herself was a kind of metaphor for  the rocky journey of Zimbabwe following independence.  As with Memory its past and present are troubling.  It is still a young country struggling to find its feet.  But Gappah is optimistic about its future.   Like Memory, who has twice been dispossessed from her family and from her culture, it has acquired many valuable things through that dispossession.  Resolution is to be found when Memory is smuggled out of prison to teach the prison warden’s child to pass her exams - a modus vivendi which works to their mutual advantage, eschewing previous destructive antagonism.  She must fight victimhood, fight being caught up in the drama of what she believes, preventing her from facing the truth about her identity.  We drew parallels with Zimbabwe.   Its identity is further stressed by the inclusion of non-translatable Shona - some of us felt this was unnecessary, others that it was important and explained by the context.

When Memory is forced to face the ways in which she’d misinterpreted the past and of the importance and need for forgiveness the writing is particularly powerful and moving.  The sad past in which her uneducated parents’ lives were controlled by fate/ Ngozi, unable to understand their misfortune was only due to random chance.  We drew comparisons with our own society and the part played in our island history by superstition and fate, as well as citing its impact in other places where some of us had lived.

But for the bookclub we’d never have read this book, and been much the poorer for not having done so.