An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah

My review of An Elegy for Easterly appears today in the Christian Science Monitor. I’m delighted to be appearing in the Monitor for the first time, and it’s especially nice to be writing about Zimbabwe, where I lived and worked for a time. It’s a good book, too.

The characters in these stories are not Zimbabwe’s worst off. They are not dying of AIDS, though they know people who are. Many have seen foreign countries, though they may no longer be able to afford a plane ticket. Many are educated, with bits of T.S. Eliot and Thomas Hardy in the backs of their minds.They are suffering, though others are suffering far more, but they face the grim realities of their country with creativity, liveliness, and a resilient sense of humor.

“An Elegy for Easterly,” the title story, follows the lives of the inhabitants of a squatter settlement until the government’s bulldozers come to scrape away their homes of poles and mud and plastic. “The Annex Shuffle” is about a law student’s mental breakdown, temporary yet long-lasting in its effects. “The Mupandawana Dancing Champion” tells of an aging coffinmaker with an unexpected flair for disco dancing.