The House of Hunger
The narrator packs what he owns and walks out of the four-room township box he grew up in, where his father went under a train, his brother Peter beats Immaculate in the next room and the beer hall is the only public building for miles. What follows is less a sequence than a set of returns — the mission school, the university riots, a white farmer, an albino, a rat, a woman's face — cut into one another in an English deliberately battered out of its schoolroom shape. Marechera wrote the title novella and the stories around it in England after Oxford sent him down, and the collection took the Guardian Fiction Prize the year after it appeared.
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Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
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