Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo

Published 2022 · 416 pages · 126,399 words · about 14 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Satire & Humor

How hard is Glory to read?

Glory scores 72 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 70 out of 100
The novel consistently integrates the Ndebele interjection 'tholukuthi,' creating a distinctive linguistic rhythm that requires reader adaptation. Specialized animal-as-human terms like 'mals,' 'femals,' and 'itchtail' further enrich the vocabulary, alongside sophisticated descriptive language. This usage pushes complexity beyond standard literary fiction, though not to the extreme of invented languages like 'Finnegans Wake.'
Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
Sentences are frequently long and multi-clausal, employing extensive subordination and parallelism to build detailed descriptions and arguments. While grammatically sound, the accumulation of detail and the rhythmic insertions of 'tholukuthi' demand sustained reader attention, placing it above works with direct, declarative sentences like '1984.'
Abstraction: 75 out of 100
The entire narrative functions as a political allegory, with animal characters representing human political figures and societal roles, requiring constant interpretive engagement. The text delves into abstract themes of power, legacy, and post-colonial critique through its satirical events and speeches, particularly in sections like 'Mulling a Legacy,' making it more abstract than '2666' but less purely philosophical than 'Waiting for Godot.'
Information density: 76 out of 100
Each allegorical character and event carries significant symbolic weight, packing multiple layers of political and social commentary into the narrative. The text demands high attention to decode the author's critique, especially through rapid-fire enumerations of grievances (Chapter 16) and diverse societal perspectives (Chapter 18).
Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
The novel employs an animal allegory, requiring readers to consistently infer human political parallels from the characters and events. While the satirical intent is often clear, the sustained allegorical framework demands active interpretation to translate the animal kingdom's actions into a critique of post-colonial authoritarianism, similar to the inferential demands of reading against an unreliable narrator in books like Lolita or The Great Gatsby.
Symbolic density: 80 out of 100
The entire narrative functions as a political allegory, with every animal character, their species, and their actions carrying symbolic weight beyond their literal meaning. Elements like the 'Father of the Nation,' 'Dr. Sweet Mother,' the 'Defenders,' and the 'land of milk and honey' are potent symbols, making the text rich with meaning that extends far beyond the surface events, akin to the pervasive symbolism in Moby-Dick.
Ironic distance: 85 out of 100
The narrative maintains a significant ironic distance through its satirical portrayal of the ruling regime, presenting official propaganda and exaggerated praise for the 'Father of the Nation' with a clear underlying critique. The gap between the glorified rhetoric and the implied reality of corruption, fear, and poverty is consistently highlighted, requiring readers to discern the author's critical stance, much like the sustained satire found in The Sellout.
Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
The excerpt concludes with significant political tension and unresolved power struggles among the elite, particularly between the Vice President and the First Lady, leaving the future stability of the regime ambiguous. While individual events like the protest are brutally suppressed, the broader societal issues and the internal conflicts within the ruling class remain open-ended, suggesting a lack of definitive closure on the nation's trajectory.
Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
The narrative generally follows a linear progression of events during Independence Day, but it incorporates stylistic repetitions like 'tholukuthi' and a notable structural shift in Chapter 18, which presents multiple, unattributed voices 'mulling a legacy.' These elements, while not as radical as those in Ulysses, introduce a moderate level of formal experimentation and varied perspectives beyond a straightforward chronological account.

How Glory is regarded

Glory holds a literary regard score of 46 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Glory sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (248 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Glory scores 90 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.3. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
The Old Horse crawled and crawled on the very same hooves with which he’d once upon a time galloped up and down the length and breadth of Jidada at the speed of lightning.
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal)
We hear Nkunzemnyama tell us the butterflies were once animal beings like us, who once walked Jidada like us until they were massacred just a couple of years after Jidada’s independence.
Mythos: Irony vi (irony vi)
so that in a matter of hours, the institution of Defending as had been known for the decades of the Seat of Power’s reign fell at last.
Genre: Anatomy + Romance

Where the story of Glory takes place

  • An allegorical Zimbabwe, the 2017 coup and its aftermath (2017 to 2018), the main setting
  • Bulawayo village, Gukurahundi massacre, April 18, 1983 and after (1983 to 1987)
  • Lozikeyi, 2008 election violence (Destiny's torture)
  • Jidada (allegorical Zimbabwe), Nov 2017 coup to post-2019 uprising (2017 to 2020)
  • Processing Center and the road to Hell, the Old Horse's afterlife

5 things that are true of Glory, with the passage for each

  1. The Old Horse boasts at the Independence rally that he has outdone Christ by dying and resurrecting many times.

    That’s where I have beaten Christ. Christ died once, and resurrected just once.

  2. The First Femal gets a PhD in sociology from the University of Jidada by phone call.

    And thus, Marvelous was awarded a PhD in sociology from the University of Jidada before you could say diss, for dissertation.

  3. Tuvy renames essentially every street in the country after himself.

    so that in no time pretty much every street, every road, every avenue in Jidada was named Tuvy

  4. Destiny is shot through the chest while reading her book on stage and keeps reading to the end of her section.

    That Commander Jambanja, son of Commander John Soso, pulled the trigger, but that Destiny, daughter of Simiso Khumalo, stood there and read in that voice that was full of the dead.

  5. The Crocodile is killed by three shots from an old hen, Comrade Nevermiss Nzinga.

    Comrade Nevermiss Nzinga landed two more meticulous shots—a follow-up on the brain, and another on the spine.

Scenes in Glory that Frye would name

67 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
And then she said thank you. And only then did she drop facedown, tholukuthi the heart already quiet, already silent like the inside of a seed. Destiny's sacrificial death on the Remembrance stage.
Katabasis, untitled
To his surprise the world underneath, just like the world above, was a landscape complete with trees and grass and flowers and rocks and mountains. The Old Horse follows the dead Comrades down the anthill into the world of the massacred.
Pathos, untitled
my uncle—Sakhile Bathakathi George Khumalo, my uncle, SaCetshwayo—finally died death. Uncle SaCetshwayo's forced killing under the mabrosi tree.
Sparagmos, untitled
Died in pieces. In pieces. Just pieces pieces pieces. The body is hacked apart by his own son at the Defenders' command.
Sparagmos, untitled
He saw bodies of pregnant femals with bellies cut open, fetuses dangling. The underworld vision of the massacre as a landscape of mutilated bodies.
Lyric, untitled
drowning in Brenda Fassie’s voice, drowning in the song “Memeza,” that is also a lamentation of an absent mother An embedded song that turns into Destiny's own lament.

Books that share these scenes with Glory

About the author

NoViolet Bulawayo