The One with the Lagos Girls and the First Lady Dalloway

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Arrangements and Other Stories

This short story collection is a selection by a French publisher to present 5 pieces from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with French on the right page and English on the left, a popular method for advanced learners to start into English literature without being too intimidated. (I could write endlessly about the weird pedagogic methods of teaching foreign languages in France where most people end up too ashamed and traumatized to utter a single word in front of the occasional American tourist. I guess you didn’t come for such a rant. Ahem, I step down from my soapbox).

Because of this rather arbitrary choice, there is no unity or thread to find among those stories. The first one is a story first published in the New York Times during the 2016 campaign. Adichie chose to write a day in the life of Melania Trump à la Mrs. Dalloway. Like Mrs. Dalloway, Melania is going to have a party on the evening and we follow her thoughts and interactions with Donald, Ivanka and other people in a stream-of-consciousness fashion.

Now, I sure don’t want to waste my time following every interaction of the real POTUS and FLOTUS, but their fictional counterparts’ day is fascinating, all the more as Adichie wrote it before they were elected. It is rather mind-blowing to read this story now that he’s been elected and that we know how the future turned out. I don’t know about you, but I can’t for the life of me remember what Mr. Dalloway is supposed to do all day. But I bet he was not going to get impeached or start a war with a nuclear country.

The other stories are very different and centered on Nigerian women, with themes intersecting the ones I read in Americanah: the marriage arrangements of a rich Nigerian man who has a wife in the U.S. and a mistress in Lagos (in Imitation), the exile of a young Nigerian girl as she arrives in the U.S., the mutual misunderstanding of the emigrants when they communicate with their family and friends in the home country. The American Embassy is a real tear-jerker and I need to give an advance warning because it deals with the death of a child (I was not warned and it hit me like a ton of bricks). I was even angry that Adichie would use this plot for a short story, I expected more of her.

Despite my small reservation on this last story, I loved this collection and it confirms that I need to read other novels and short stories by this now-favorite author. (I read it in September and I’m sorry it took me so long to review!)

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ETA Feb. 6, 2020: The 4 stories beside The Arrangements are actually taken from the collection “The thing arount your neck” (2009)

The One between Lagos, London and Princeton

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013)

Every time I’m awed by a book, I don’t know what to write about it. I feel all the feelings, but the only thought that morphs into my brain is: it’s just awesome, go read it! It’s as if my critical mind had deserted me…

What I like in this book is that it’s so rich and layered. I had got the impression that it was about race in America seen from the perspective of a non African-American black woman, and it is that… too.

But not only. It’s a love story through three continents (Africa, America and Europe), a coming-of-age story, the story of losing oneself and finding oneself again, of struggling to survive and dreaming of success, of losing a loved one and finding him/her again, it’s about finding one’s identity in-between nations, it’s about needing to go away and needing to come back.

I had never before thought about the deep differences between African-American and Africans in America. I am more familiar with African immigrants in Europe coming from old colonized French-speaking countries. I didn’t know anything about Nigeria, except for the jokes on Internet scams featuring Nigerian princes needing your credit card number. A lot of scenes in the book made me think of my own habits and prejudices as a privileged white woman in Europe (for disclosure, we employed a nanny from Africa for the kids for 8 years – the part when Ifemelu is employed by an American family was eerily relatable and also highlighted to me the differences between the US and Europe).

I had feared that the book would be too US-centered, but it is definitely not. In the end, as a European reader, I also see in it the universal attraction that the American culture has across the globe, which isn’t the reality of what living in America would feel like. We keep projecting ideals and false ideas on a country that remains foreign to us, even though we see so much of it everywhere.

It’s definitely one of the best books I read this year so far. So… go read it!

The One for the New Feminist Mother

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017)

This short book is 15 pieces of advice that Adichie gave to a friend who just had a baby girl and wanted to raise her as a feminist. It’s very short, blog-post like short, and I wondered for a while if it was worth publishing it as a book. But the content should definitely be widely available both in electronic and in paper format!

I wanted to applaud at every suggestion, but sadly it’s not anything new, and it doesn’t mean that these thoughtful principles are universally respected, far from it! It reads like a brief primer to feminist ideas, but I’m afraid it will only convince those who are already feminists. It’s simple, efficient and well put, but as a mother of two boys I wish she would have written a book about raising a feminist boy, and not a girl. I appreciated that the tone of the book was full of poise and hope and not depressing as those subjects could easily become.

It’s my first read by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, but definitely not the last: I’m really looking forward to reading her novel Americanah.

The One with the Somali Juliet

Fartumo Kusow, Tale of a Boon’s Wife (2017) 

It feels like a first novel, and it feels like something close to the author’s heart so I don’t want to be overly critical.

There are many things I liked about this novel: it taught me stuff about Somalia, that there is a cast system like in India and that people are discouraged to marry across cast boundaries. That there was some prosperity and peace in this country somewhere in the 1970s or 1980s and that the government tried to abolish the cast system. I liked Idil, the main character of this novel, and I liked her pluckiness as a girl, her fidelity to her beliefs and her love as a grown woman and as a wife and mother, her courage in front of the ever darkening adversity. She does not mop around, she picks herself up and moves forward.

It is a very emotional book and while some things go as wrong as you would predict it, some things go even worse. Most readers will be drawn to Idil early on, because she is so relatable to our Western thoughts and she doesn’t understand why she should be inferior to men and marry according to their wishes and to the cast system instead of marrying for love. She is from the upper class / aristocratic caste (Bliss) and she falls in love with a young man from the lowest class possible, the Boons. We get to care about her and it’s tough to read all the hardships she goes through. It felt too much, but I guess it’s only fair game given the recent Somali history. The most heartbreaking characters are those of Idil’s mother and Idil’s sister-in-law, who have internalized the traditions and prejudices and who are blaming other women for men infidelities, or justifying decisions that are detrimental to themselves with fatalism. I wish these two characters would have been portrayed with more subtlety.

The biggest weakness of the book is in the ending, in my opinion, that feels hurried and rather illogical. Baddies in this book are really evil, and it makes no sense that Idil would fall into every trap of theirs. Despite these few problems, I still wanted to read until the last page and that’s a good enough sign.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher Second Story Press for the review copy.

Charlotte Otter, Balthasar’s Gift (2013)

I could start with “I should have read this book a long time ago”, or “I’m like the last person on the blog world to post about this book”, or “why oh why did this book linger for so long on my nightstand?”… and I could tell you a lot of excuses. The truth is, I bought this book first when it came out in German, because Charlotte Otter is a delightful person whose blog I have been reading for ages and because I like crime novels with a deep sense of setting.

But I’m reading German very slowly these days, and my understanding level is not really enough to follow a well-crafted plot full of characters and twists and turns (did I mention fights?). So the book remained there half-read. I got frustrated. Not with the book, but with myself, for forgetting the languages I was fluent in before (I’m not even starting on Chinese), for failing myself, and failing Charlotte who had taken extraordinary lengths to have this book published (can you imagine that she also has three kids and a corporate job?).

And then I decided to look facts squarely like they are, and not waste energy and time in guilt and regrets, a bit like Otter’s heroin Maggie Cloete who rushes headlong into her investigations even if it means putting herself at risk. I wanted to enjoy the detailed South-African background of the book, understand the deeper issues of Aids during the 1990s, and for that I had to let go of the German book. Mid-December, I bought Balthasar’s Gift in English this time, and it was such fun!

Dark fun, but still. Everything I know about South-Africa is through the media or hearsay, but Charlotte managed to make the country alive under our eyes, in its complexity and density, without slowing the plot down with too much explanation. The only downside of this book is that there is a lot going on, probably enough to fill two books, so that it takes a while to have all the strands neatly tied up at the end!

In this mystery, Maggie Cloete, a determined crime reporter in Pietermaritzburg, hasn’t followed up on a call by Balthasar Meiring, an AIDS activist, who urged her to take an interest in the trial of a quack accused of selling fake Aids drugs. A few days later, the AIDS activist is shot, and soon Maggie feels that it’s more than just a random robbery killing.

I won’t probably buy the next book in German, but I’ll gladly read the next Maggie Cloete mystery!

Kossi Efoui, Solo d’un Revenant (French, 2008)

It’s pretty normal for challenges to be challenging, right? If you were 100% sure to find the book you expected when taking a reading challenge, that would soon be a bore, right? Global Voices Challenge defied me (at least, I took it personally) to try a book from a country I never read anything about, in honor of UNESCO World Book Day today. I entrusted my fate to chance, and chance gave me a book from Togo. A challenging book I won’t forget anytime soon, dealing with mass murder and its consequences.

“Solo d’un Revenant”: I need explain the title because language and words are very important in this book. I love the way Kossi Efoui uses French in a poetic way. He’s a playwright and a theater director, and you can see how circumspect he is with gestures and words. It sounds “African” to my ears, because of the rhythm, the drumming of repetitions, the way worlds come again and again with an added layer every time, like the “turn of screw”. In Henry James the turn of screw was for fear and horror, and in this book it’s about the same, except that facts behind the story are only too real.

“Revenant” has a double entendre: it’s a returnee, a man who comes back to South Gloria, his hometown after ten years being a refugee in the peacekeeping zone of North Gloria. His hometown, on the wrong side of the checkpoint, has witnessed civil war and massacre. We never know where this fictitious town is, but strong allusions to the Tutsi genocide could put it in Rwanda, but there were so many other conflicts in this continent. But “Revenant” is also a ghost, returning from death. Actually we can’t be sure whether the narrator is alive, but like the ghost he might be, he has come back to understand how his friend Mozaya died and to take revenge on another friend, Asafo Johnson, who probably was an accomplice in the genocide (of this we’re not sure either). He comes back alone, and lonely, and people around him are shady and tragic: Maïs (Corn in English), the child-soldier who can answer to any need and even teach you how to use a gun, Xhosa-Anna, a woman who wears a wedding gown, Marlene, an aid worker whose NGO has left the country and left her behind. The government constantly celebrates peace and reconciliation, but people are still traumatized by the war and can’t forget or forgive. Some hire private investigators to find lost ones and the same who also turn into hired killers when the customer prefers revenge. Even trials can’t offer justice, as witnesses retract or disappear, and judges can be bought.

Throughout the novel, the “Revenant” feels as if he were on a boat leaving the bank and at the same time standing on the shore looking at the departing boat. The narrator wants to understand why one friend died, one supported the massacre and he survived, but there is no “why” offered. This book is very dark and moving at the same time. Hope is nearly absent and even children are no longer innocent and must be distrusted.

But at the same time, the language is so beautiful and innovative that you really wish to go on reading and reading… I wish I could translate some to English, but with the double entendre and allusions and rhythm, that would be a very challenging exercise. I found an interesting interview of Efoui on the internet about the language, which I hope to comment here in a few days.