During a phone call with her mother and her childhood friends, she's more worried about missing out on the movie (which turns out to be pornographic) that she and her American friends were watching in the basement.įor her, the American dream isn't the one anyone expected. She lives this purgatorial existence between two starkly different lands. She slowly loses touch with her old friends, but at the same time misses them, her mother and Paradise terribly. Once there, Darling makes humorous observations about American culture for example, that Americans smile at each other for no reason.Īs she grows up, Darling assimilates with her school friends, speaking like them, dressing like them. Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency.Through BornFree's murder, we understand that the elections in Zimbabwe have not made a dent in the country's problems, so Darling is sent to 'Destroyedmichigan' (Detroit, Michigan) to live with her Aunt Fostalina.

In this promising novel’s early chapters, Bulawayo’s use of English is disarmingly fresh, her arrangement of words startling. I don’t feel inspired by America at all,” and the chapters set outside of Africa make this abundantly clear. When Bulawayo won the Caine Prize, she said, “I want to go and write from home. Darling may not be worse off, but her life has not improved in any meaningful way. Darling and her friends invent new names for themselves from American TV and spent their time trying to get “rid of Chipo’s stomach.” Abruptly, Darling lands with her aunt in America, seen as an ugly place, and absorbs the worst of its culture-Internet porn, obscene consumerism, the depreciation of education. Now they roam rich neighborhoods, stealing bull guavas and hiding in trees while gangs raid white homes. “Before,” they lived in real houses and went to school-that is, before the paramilitary policemen came and destroyed it all, before AIDS, before Darling’s friend Chipo was impregnated by her own grandfather.

Ten-year-old Darling is Virgil, leading us through Paradise, the shantytown where she and her friends Bastard, Godknows, Sbho, and Stina live and play. Indeed the first half of the book, which follows a group of destitute but fearless children in a ravaged, never-named African country, is a remarkable piece of literature. The short story that was adapted to become the first chapter of this debut novel by current Stegner fellow Bulawayo won the Caine Prize in 2011, known as the African Booker.

We need new names novel