Zimbabwe and South Africa at the last half of the 20th century provide the complex backdrop for Nangle's melancholy debut. Structured
as a series of snapshots in the life of Colleen, daughter of a white farmer and a former missionary, the book looks at the harrowing
transitions from white to black rule. As a child, Colleen survives malaria in then-Rhodesia, which leaves her with a lifelong legacy
of hallucinatory dreams that may or may not have a real-world basis. She also learns to cope with her younger sister's schizophrenia.
The guerrilla warfare of the 1970s creates a tacit barrier between Colleen and her many Shona friends (the Shona people make up a
majority in Zimbabwe). Their reluctance to tell Colleen the truth about their political activities causes her to inadvertently betray
them. Over time—and with a few harrowing adventures of her own as she studies nursing in South Africa, marries and gives birth to
a son—the number of black Africans in Colleen's life dwindles. She is herded into a purely white world, despite the end of apartheid.
While a simple coming of age tale on the surface, Nangle's poetic and often heartbreaking story exposes racism's insidious effect
on all concerned.
— Publishers Weekly
A difficult adolescence and young womanhood are lived out during Rhodesia’s violent transition into contemporary Zimbabwe, in Michigan
author Nangle’s compelling first novel.
The central character, Colleen, through whose viewpoint we observe these changes, grows up
on the coffee farm owned by her widowed father, a former American missionary who stayed on in Nyadzi after his wife’s death from malaria.
The novel’s first half offers lyrical episodic portrayals of Colleen’s protective yet combative relationship with her mentally disturbed
younger sister Sarah (who “hears voices,” and is eventually sent to a “special school”) and stoical devotion to her hardworking father,
juxtaposed with gratifying relationships with a number of native (Shona) caregivers and comrades. The more memorable of the latter
include her family’s household servant Mapipi (first to realize the seriousness of Sarah’s condition), mission nurse Julia Chonongera
(in whose footsteps Colleen will follow) and Colleen’s de facto first love Heresekwe, a passionate Shona activist in the making. What
Colleen learns from them all—and from the lepers who, to her unjaundiced eye, “look like lions”—clashes with the policies of a brutal
colonial government and sets her on a path of resistance and commitment that is compressed, perhaps rather too tightly, into tense
later chapters that detail her experiences as a community health nurse, her marriage to a multiracial musician and her embattled motherhood..
Nangle brings Colleen’s story to a moving conclusion, after she has survived grave threats to her new life and made peace with the
world of her youth, as her father’s passing coincides with national and cultural change.
A fine debut novel, and a welcome glimpse
of a troubled world which one hopes Nangle will explore in fuller detail in future work.
— Kirkus Reviews
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The Leper Compound (Bellevue Literary Press, 2008) by Paula Nangle is a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of violence, illness,
and political unrest during the last days of white rule in southern African countries. The book opens with young Colleen, having forgotten
to take her quinine pill, contracting malaria and proceeds to chronicle the various illnesses of those around her—a teacher who is
dying of cancer, her younger sister Sarah’s mental illness, the men and women she encounters at a leper compound, and, eventually,
her own child, who is born with a serious heart defect. Colleen, who is white, witnesses, alongside these illnesses, acts of violence
during the revolt against apartheid. She struggles to gauge her place and to find connection with the native Shona people, though
she is summarily told, first by a nurse who gently chides her for saying “us,” and second, years later, by her African boyfriend who
is involved in political uprisings and keeps secrets from Colleen, that she will never be included in their group. She sympathizes
with the revolution but is never able to fully grasp its significance and is unwilling to whole-heartedly adopt the cause. Instead,
she, in the end, finds the connection she’s been searching for as a nurse, caring for the ill, and married to a white man, completely
immersed in the white segment of the population.
There is much to admire in this debut novel. Paula Nangle, who grew up in southern
Africa, the daughter of white missionaries, writes deftly and subtly about a character who is unwilling to face the situation around
her. Nangle masterfully conveys a sort of nagging terror, a character who witnesses a great deal, but is unable to comprehend it,
to fear it straight-on. Likewise, Colleen possess a vague sort of guilt for being a member of the ruling race but she never quite
gives in to understanding the injustice of apartheid. There is considerable skill in how Nangle portrays a character that is not necessarily
unreliable, but whose perspective is instead stunted; the deeper meanings of the events swirl around her thoughts and impressions
and rise up from them. In the end, there is no dramatic epiphany, no great change in Colleen; she simply fades into the white culture
having never completed assimilated all that she has witnessed. Throughout, Nangle’s prose is clear, and she resists every urge towards
sentimentality. It is a tightly written, thoroughly imagined, masterfully depicted story.
—Susan Woodring, Perpetual Folly
Paula Nangle's debut novel, The Leper Compound
, is a book I won't soon forget. I'm tempted to call it a novel-in-stories as
each chapter is perfectly self-contained and yet the whole does provide one full narrative. Regardless, it is a brilliant effort.
The book starts out with Colleen as a motherless child ill with Malaria and ends with the death of her father and with her mentally
ill sister (schizophrenia since childhood) finally finding a mother in their father's new wife. Throughout, Colleen struggles with
her sense of identity and her desire to make sense of life and death--she is a lover, a nurse, a mother--and through it all, an outsider.
All of this could take place anywhere at any time, but it does not: it takes place in the waning years of Rhodesia. A fascinating
back drop lending the book political and social overtones and adding to its richness (especially poignant with Zimbabwe so present
in the news these days).
I cannot quote from the book as the copy I have is an ARC, but I can tell you this: Nangle can write. In
fact, she writes beautifully--her words are moving and yet never overdone. It would have been easy for her to be melodramatic with
her subject matter. Instead, she opts for clean, precise language.
I hope to read more from her and I hope that you will look for
this book and read it and allow it to move you in the way it has moved me.
—Myfanwy Collins, Blogspot