Leah Rachel von Essen's Reviews > Glory

I can hardly believe that NoViolet Bulawayo accomplished what she did in novel Glory, a vivid satire about the unraveling of a dictatorship inspired by George Orwell's Animal Farm and by the oral traditions of Zimbabwe. At turns bitterly ironic, hilariously absurd, and painfully violent, this novel features Old Horse, the ruler of Jidada, and the story of the coup that tore him from his seat.

It parodies the structures of fear, silence, toxic masculinity and patriarchy, hero worship, performative change, and more, that keep oppressive governments running, to devastating effect. The allegory never hesitates, richly showing us the revision and sanitizing of the past, and the powerful role that speaking out and sharing the truths of the country’s history play in dissolving an atmosphere held together by silence and denial. The love for a country and people—the way towards successful uprising and confrontation—it's all there.

Bulawayo's story ranges across narrators and characters, from the Old Horse himself to a youth named Destiny who comes back to her mother, Simiso, after years of living abroad; she confronts the changes that have come to her country and the way the women around her are rebelling against the regime. The changes, the disillusionment and pain, the passive horrors—Bulawayo captures them all with a daring narrative that shouldn't flow as well as it does.

Readers will have to accept that they won't know all non-English words. You'll be fine. The one I'll share is "Tholukuthi," which starts many of the paragraphs—based on my research and context I believe it means "to discover," "to find," and so it serves in this story, which reads as narration, as oral tradition, to introduce almost: "You find that," as in "Tholukuthi this book comes out in March, and it's time to put it on hold at your local library."

Glory was one of my most anticipated books of 2021, and I feel strongly that I was right to be so excited about it. It uses magical realism, allegory, tweets, and more to create a compelling and vividly true-feeling novel about a revolution, that surprised me again and again, and brought me to tears in its final pages.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Content warnings for sex shaming, rape culture, and rape; genocide and ethnic cleansing; police brutality and shooting; violence, gore, body horror; political repression.