For my Nervous Conditions project, I'm continuing to read The Book of Not, the sequel, which will be expanded into a poster illustrating Tambu's growing problems in a culturally-mixed society. In the pages I have read, I mostly learned about Tambu's place at Sacred Heart, which seems to be her peak of learning right now. She goes back and forth from there to the mission, but I can see her as a really isolated but disciplined character. Going into this book, I expected to read a lot about her journey in the distant future, and hear some about how the war has made her feel even more a victim. Actually, this book is hardly even violent. She makes sort of violent references to this "leg being blown off" we all witnessed when we read the first pages aloud in class, but other than that there isn't much gore going on. My goal is to be completely, or at least almost finished with the novel by the middle of this week, because I'm ready to get the presentation over with before Spring Break to prove that, yeah, I read the whole Nervous Conditions series!
I made a promise that I'd get The Book of Not read, so that I can contribute my knowledge of both books to this project. We're (as in our group of me, Justin and Dalton) going to incorporate quotes from the book, and use images of setting and depiction to give a better meaning of the series, and kind of go along with Tambu's experience step-by-step. I've paid a lot of attention to the repeated patterns and themes. A lot of the time, Tambu blames her family for the continuous hardships she faces when she gets "distracted" sometimes, like when she "looks up to the mountains." This doesn't really make sense, but I think what Dangarembga means is that those are places of danger, that she sometimes wants to escape to or avoid, and uses her sister as a testimony since that's how her leg got blown off. Most of the other problems she faces have to do with race and class. We see a lot of hatred sent towards her and her roommates as they constantly get into trouble. It makes me think that this is more of a racist than sexist social setting. Her superior class is an issue, too, and leads her to further isolation. I'm excited to finish this book and series, once and for all, and then finally be able to relate all of the knowledge about Nervous Conditions to the real world (maybe)!
Reading Times:
Tuesday 3/27 - 30 minutes finishing Ch. 3; 15 minutes starting to read Ch. 4 (all from The Book of Not)
Wednesday 3/28 - 25 minutes reading/annotating Chs. 4 and 5 of The Book of Not
Thursday 3/29 - 30 minutes reading part of Ch. 6 from The Book of Not
Saturday 3/31 - 80 minutes reading through the rest of Chs. 6 and 7 of The Book of Not
Sunday 4/1 - 100+ minutes reading/annotating Chs. 8 and 9 of The Book of Not
Total Pages: 101 pages, pp. 40-141 of The Book of Not
Sounds like an interesting book. I may look into it.
ReplyDeletefrom, maxman21