Without a Name and Under the Tongue

by Yvonne Vera

Yvonne Vera's novels chronicle the lives of Zimbabwean women with extraordinary power and beauty. Without a Name and Under the Tongue, her two earliest novels, are set in the seventies during the guerrilla war against the white government.

In Without a Name (1994), Mazvita, a young woman from the country, travels to Harare to escape the war and begin a new life. But her dreams of independence are short-lived. She begins...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374528160
• ISBN13: 9780374528164
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Amazing

I can barely find words that adequately express what Yvonne Vera accomplishes in her writing. This book contains some of the most gorgeous language I have ever read. It is dense, poetic, sensual, muscular, challenging, honest, deeply humane. I read and reread it, and each time I am lifted to a blissful, mind-swelling state of aesthetic arrest. You may not enjoy Vera's style if you tend to prefer a light-hearted read. But if you enjoy a sensitivity for language, it will be pure joy. Your mind glides with the smoothly sustained surface of the writing, undulates with its poetic rhythms, startles with her revelations, lifted to your new eyes like some just-born thing, dangerous or gentle, held in the tender palm of her cupped hands. The story lines are described well enough in the product description above, but it is a mistake to read Vera's writing with eyes focused on the scaffolding of character and plot. She has imploded that structure, sinking to some deeper level and creating the story from the inside out, with a pure and powerful voice that has the impact of poetry in the space of fiction. This fiction isn't well-crafted, it is inspired.