The Thing Around Your Neck--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie gives us an uneven collection of 12 short stories. All of them are beautifully written, but some, touching on themes of identity and domesticity quickly become repetitive. I would start reading a story in the collection and wonder, haven't I read this before? And realize that I wasn't skipping around in the collection, so I couldn't have, and yet I couldn't shake the feeling I had seen it.
The most powerful stories in the collection deal with some of the darker aspects of life in Nigeria. "Cell One," "The American Embassy," and "Ghosts" all achieve some of their power through the reality of life in Nigeria. "A Private Experience," recounts the story of a Muslim woman and a Christian woman trapped in an abandoned shop during a riot. The story is reminiscent of some of the bleaker, more desperately moving moments in Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them (a book filled with little but bleak and desperate). In fact, it reminds one of "Luxurious Hearses," a story dramatizing the same kind of conflict. Unlike that collection, The Thing Around Your Neck is more consistently readable (not better) because it is less bleak.
Less bleak, but never happy. Very few moments are captured here wherein the participants in events are truly happy or at ease. When the strife is not political or ethnic, it's domestic; and this is where the book begins to lose some of its impact. If no one can ever be happy in any situation--well what's the point. Adichie succumbs to the same mysterious disease that affects another expatriate author, Jhumpa Lahiri. There is no happiness for people no longer part of their own country. And, not having had the experience of being expatriate, perhaps it is true. But it eventually makes for some wearisome reading.
The collection is very strong, very well written. The story about the writer's workshop in South Africa mentions some of the great writers of the past who were African or who wrote about Africa--Amos Tuotela (The Palm-Wine Drinkard), Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart), and others inform the writing and the sensibility of the book. They form the context for another writer of great talent and ability. My only hope is that the range gradually increases to encompass moments of pleasure, happiness, and joy. Surely even in strife-torn Africa, there must be some such. I would love to see some of them.
****--Recommended
The most powerful stories in the collection deal with some of the darker aspects of life in Nigeria. "Cell One," "The American Embassy," and "Ghosts" all achieve some of their power through the reality of life in Nigeria. "A Private Experience," recounts the story of a Muslim woman and a Christian woman trapped in an abandoned shop during a riot. The story is reminiscent of some of the bleaker, more desperately moving moments in Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them (a book filled with little but bleak and desperate). In fact, it reminds one of "Luxurious Hearses," a story dramatizing the same kind of conflict. Unlike that collection, The Thing Around Your Neck is more consistently readable (not better) because it is less bleak.
Less bleak, but never happy. Very few moments are captured here wherein the participants in events are truly happy or at ease. When the strife is not political or ethnic, it's domestic; and this is where the book begins to lose some of its impact. If no one can ever be happy in any situation--well what's the point. Adichie succumbs to the same mysterious disease that affects another expatriate author, Jhumpa Lahiri. There is no happiness for people no longer part of their own country. And, not having had the experience of being expatriate, perhaps it is true. But it eventually makes for some wearisome reading.
The collection is very strong, very well written. The story about the writer's workshop in South Africa mentions some of the great writers of the past who were African or who wrote about Africa--Amos Tuotela (The Palm-Wine Drinkard), Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart), and others inform the writing and the sensibility of the book. They form the context for another writer of great talent and ability. My only hope is that the range gradually increases to encompass moments of pleasure, happiness, and joy. Surely even in strife-torn Africa, there must be some such. I would love to see some of them.
****--Recommended
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