This month's meeting is in Billingshurst on Tuesday, and this month's book is one of the Booker Prize short-listed titles for 2013. I really enjoyed the fresh, vibrant voice, vivid descriptions and child-like detachment from the terrible atrocities being lived through by the novel's 10-year-old narrator, Darling.
Here are some questions for discussion:
What did you enjoy and/or find surprising about the style and tone of the narrative voice?
Bulawayo has revealed that Darling was based on a child in a photograph sitting on the rubble that was his bulldozed home after the Zimbabwean government carried out Operation Murambatsvina. How realistic do you find her portrayal?
How did the descriptions of the children's games inform the story?
How compelling did you find the episodic nature of the plot? Which episodes and characters stood out?
How are the female African characters portrayed?
Bulawayo is one of a number of African writers who have been accused of 'performing Africa'; that is to imbue writing with images and symbols which evoke pity and fear, not in the tragic and cathartic Aristotelean sense, but a 'CNN Western-media-coverage, poverty-porn representation. With allusions to genocide, political brutality, female circumcision, starvation, AIDS, is the novel guilty of this charge?
In what ways was America depicted as worse than the regime from which Darling has fled. Is this a successful representation of the illusionary nature of the American Dream?
How successfully is the 'immigrant story' explored?
What is the significance of the ending?
