LoveReading Says
Glory is an irreverent, political satire novel, set in a fictitious Zimbabwe called Jidada, where animals are governed by a corrupt dictator, an Old Horse who fought for the country’s independence during the Liberation War of colonial times and whose rulership is so uncontested that he can even command the sun. But when a military coup ousts him from office, the ‘mals’ of Jidada wonder if it finally means an end to the oppressive regime of the Party of Power. Will the Opposition pave a new way forward to freedom or will the ‘mals’ finally realise what power they have when they all stand together?
Glory’s allegorical use of animals to symbolise societies and human governments gave the book a fabled feel à la Aesop’s collection of cautionary tales. In essence, Glory is a parable that takes cultural inspiration from the animal representation that is prolific in Zimbabwean folklore. Though it may have been a contentious choice to render the story of an African dictatorship through the lens of farm animals, doing so gave the narrative a striking, attention-grabbing kick that may not have existed otherwise.
Dictators like the Old Horse, Tuvius Delight Sasha and the pastor pig, Dr O. G. Moses, are depicted with a level of slapstick buffoonery that might be off-putting, but also adds a compelling irony to their otherwise tyrannical characters. Then comes the return of a prodigal daughter, a goat called Destiny, who after ten years away, returns to her mother, Simiso and thus sets the story down a more haunting and serious path of greater significance and leads to the story’s hopeful end.
I really admire the unorthodoxy of the writing style and how it pinballs between multiple narrators; from an omniscient perspective to the collective voice of the people to the oratory style of second-person narration. This book took so many linguistic liberties such as its pointed and sometimes completely outlandish use of repetition bound amongst pages of social media threads and exaggerated dialogue. It was chaotic in a structured chaos sort of way and made for sharp-witted and vigorous storytelling.
I thought Glory was brilliant! It's a post-colonial story with polarising audacity and an uplifting vision for a better future.
Lois Cudjoe
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NoViolet Bulawayo Press Reviews
Spellbinding . . . This social media-saturated narrative, interwoven with the oral storytelling techniques of idiomatic speech and call and response, makes Bulawayo feel like a pioneer . . . Glory, with a flicker of hope at its end, is allegory, satire and fairytale rolled into one mighty punch -- Sarah Ladipo Manyika - Guardian
A brilliant, 400-page post-colonial fable . . . Bulawayo is really out-Orwelling Orwell. This is a satire with sharper teeth, angrier, and also very, very funny . . . this is also a satire in which female characters are not pushed to the margins, but hold he story together . . . Bulawayo dares us, and the citizens of all Jidadas everywhere, to reimagine what our nations could someday become -- Violet Kupersmith - New York Times Book Review
An acerbic, precise, heart-rending and hilarious analysis of tyranny - Scotsman,Summer Reads of 2022*
I was very impressed indeed with NoViolet Bulawayo's debut . . . It is therefore a delight to be able to say that Bulawayo's new novel, Glory, is even better and radically different . . . acerbic, precise, heart-rending and hilarious . . . It is brave, and moving, as the citizens learn, slowly, to be unafraid. Bulawayo invites you to suspend disbelief in order that you believe -- Stuart Kelly - Scotsman
Vital and universal -- Hepzibah Anderson - Observer
Bulawayo broaches what it means to fight for democracy and call somewhere home in a timely and imaginative way . . . A memorable, funny and yet serious allegory about a country's plight under tyranny and what individual and collective freedom means in an age of virtual worlds and political soundbites -- Franklin Nelson - Financial Times
Playing with language is the key to unlocking the literary metaverse of Glory, which is about personalising a very public story . . . It's inescapably funny that the animals in Glory are contemporary human-style beings . . . Bulawayo's dense, mischievous fable is ultimately optimistic. Funny ha ha and peculiar, it delivers, over the course of 400 pages of wordplay and animal magic, a surprisingly warm, intimate and, yes, human feeling -- Melissa Katsoulis - The Times
About NoViolet Bulawayo
NOVIOLET BULAWAYO was born in Tsholotsho a year after Zimbabwe's independence from British colonial rule. When she was eighteen, she moved to Kalamazoo, Michi-gan. In 2011 she won the Caine Prize for African Writing; in 2009 she was shortlisted for the South Africa PEN Studzinsi Award, judged by JM Coetzee. Her work has appeared in magazines and in anthologies in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK. She earned her MFA at Cornell University, where she was also awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship, and she is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University in California. We Need New Names is her first novel. In 2013 it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
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