Novel probes marriage, lust and love
LAST week was both interesting and a little unhappy for Bookshelf. It saw the arrival of a brand new work titled “Tuku Backstage, Second Edition” which is a comprehensive biography of legendary Zimbabwean musician Oliver Mtukudzi written by Shepherd Mutamba. The week also saw Bookshelf the person falling ill and thereby missing the weekly read.
And instead of the new “Tuku Backstage” which by now readers at least know exists in the bookshelves across the country, this week I offer a look into the 2015 novel “Painful Tears” (Rock Printers and Publishers) written by writer and journalist Junior Dhauramanzi.
“Tuku Backstage, Second Edition”, although so far met with mixed feelings, stylishly “story-tells” the philosophy behind the music and life of Tuku but that would be looked into later on by Bookshelf.
This week, love and marriage is brought under scrutiny.
Bookshelf could not help delving in one of those novels which run along the pitch with characters acting as if they are in heaven but they are living in hell, a storyline which investigates, in touching convoluting episodes, homes and families smeared by lust, crime and uncertainty in marriage.
The 190-paged English novel is unputdownable with its characters caught up in a confused state of love. What is love in a marriage?
Although set in an African, specifically Zimbabwean society, “Painful Tears” is universal, you could feel the whole world of love coming under scrutiny.
Vida, one of the characters stuck in the drama, at some point summarily captures the gist of the story when she wonders, “Love, what type of creature is it?” (Page 130).
There is in writing what they call “sympathy and aesthetic distance”, simply which is the degree of artistic objectivity in the way the author approaches his/her theme or subject. Dhauramanzi writes from this point of view where you feel a strong sympathy for the characters.
Their roundness is engrossing. Each has a certain tear to shed; each has a pain to tell or to hold back.
It begins with Ivy running away from a crime of murder. Imagine a world where a man called Max meets Ivy, a murderer, and lust suddenly blinds him.
Here’s a woman who then becomes maid only in name and girlfriend in deed in Max’s once stable home.
Dhauramanzi, as a new author, despite her book’s awkward binding, achieves an unusual appeal to parents with issues of marriage.
She shows how it feels and what happens when love that must bind two people together falls away.
It’s a deep examination of the real substance of the drama the outside world only reads in the media.
Max gets enamoured to Ivy that he divorces his lovely wife Vida whom we are shown is not perfect as well. She is human, though she looks the one who weeps the most for love in the story.
In the background of the romance of main characters, a storm is brewing. In fact, it turns grisly as even the deceased (Matthew and Mercy killed by Ivy) come alive to demand some justice. In African culture, avenging spirits are believable.
They haunt the perpetrators until the truth outs and justice is done. Ivy, from the day she kills husband Mathew, never has peace although she tries to create “heaven” out of her scary life.
The ghosts of Mathew and Mercy, two innocent lives whom Ivy murdered, play their part in revealing the truth. Dhauramanzi, with this novel of ‘havoc’, clearly wants to lay bare the marital wisdom which seems to have diminished from our midst and created nothing but hellish opposites.
Over all, love gets beyond two people and when the world teams up against a common social ill, victory is guaranteed.
Ivy, once a friend and daughter, becomes an enemy of love the time she murders her husband.
Her own mother joins in the war against her and sees to it that justice prevails.
It is also clear that Dhauramanzi, as a journalist, dramatist, and quite experienced as judge’s assistant, had a world at her disposal which she only needed her creative key to unlock. Using her background and her creative writing powers, she came up with this fiction which is so true to life.
Junior Dhauramanzi was born on April 25 in 1984 in Manyene, Chivhu, where part of the story in “Painful Tears” is also set.
The rural touch in her fiction is in there to feel as she says she grew up in Chivhu “helping support her family by herding cattle, doing kitchen chores and helping in the fields”. “Painful Tears” is her first novel.