Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, which critics hailed as “one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years” (Baltimore Sun), with “prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes” (The Boston Globe); The Washington Post called her “the twenty-first-century daughter of Chinua Achebe.” Her award-winning Half of a Yellow Sun became an instant classic upon its publication three years later, once again putting her tremendous gifts—graceful storytelling, knowing compassion, and fierce insight into her characters’ hearts—on display. Now, in her most intimate and seamlessly crafted work to date, Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in twelve dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.
In “A Private Experience,” a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears she’s been pushing away. In “Tomorrow is Too Far,” a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brother’s death. The young mother at the center of “Imitation” finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when she learns that her husband has moved his mistress into their Lagos home. And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to reexamine them.
Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie’s signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them. The Thing Around Your Neck is a resounding confirmation of the prodigious literary powers of one of our most essential writers.
Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun) stays on familiar turf in her deflated first story collection. The tension between Nigerians and Nigerian-Americans, and the question of what it means to be middle-class in each country, feeds most of these dozen stories. Best known are "Cell One," and "The Headstrong Historian," which have both appeared in the New Yorker and are the collection's finest works. "Cell One," in particular, about the appropriation of American ghetto culture by Nigerian university students, is both emotionally and intellectually fulfilling. Most of the other stories in this collection, while brimming with pathos and rich in character, are limited. The expansive canvas of the novel suits Adichie's work best; here, she fixates mostly on romantic relationships. Each story's observations illuminate once; read in succession, they take on a repetitive slice-of-life quality, where assimilation and gender roles become ready stand-ins for what could be more probing work. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.This is a fine new collection of 12 short stories by the young Nigerian author of Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. The stories are set both in the United States and in Nigeria, where things continue to fall apart. A privileged college student gets involved in gang violence; innocent women flee from a bloody riot; some characters are visited by ghosts, while others are haunted by the memory of war. Yet as one character puts it, an easier life in the United States is cushioned by so much convenience that it feels sterile. Relations between the races are awkward at best. The title story probes the emotional gulf between a young immigrant woman and her well-off white American boyfriend. The closing story, "The Headstrong Historian," is a miniature portrait of the colonial legacy in Nigeria. Adichie, a brilliant writer whose characters stay with you for a long time, deserves to be more widely known. [See Prepub Alert, LJ2/1/09.]
—Leslie Patterson
Five of the 12 entries in this nuanced collection -- the author's first, following a coming-of-age story set in Nigeria and the highly lauded Half of a Yellow Sun, about the Biafran war for independence (the novel won the Orange Prize in 2007) -- take place in America; several others are set in Africa but involve American characters. The change in scenery allows Adichie to explore new kinds of experiences, in places where the challenges of daily life are often more subtle than in Nigeria. In "Imitation," Nkem is a "Bush Girl" who grew up eating "improvised food," such as plant leaves that always tasted like urine to her, "because she would see the neighborhood boys urinating on the stems of those plants." She marries a successful Lagos businessman who installs her in a house that "smelled fresh, like green tea," in a Philadelphia suburb, where she becomes part of what she sarcastically terms the "Rich Nigerian Men Who Sent Their Wives to America to Have Their Babies League." Nkem bakes cookies for her children's school classes and goes to Pilates twice a week with a neighbor, but she misses the "sun that glares down even when it rains." When she learns that her husband is keeping a girlfriend in his house in Lagos, she makes a decision that involves sacrificing material comforts for pride.
The narrator of the title story is also a woman who must choose between a certain level of ease, provided for her by a man in America, and what she thinks of as her personal integrity. Akunna goes to live with her uncle in a "small white town in Maine" after winning a visa lottery. But when he tries to molest her she flees to another small town in Connecticut, "the last stop of the Greyhound bus," where she gets a job waiting tables and finds an American boyfriend who is fascinated with African culture. He buys her presents that baffle her, like "a shiny rock whose surface took on the color of whatever touched it." Akunna tells him that in her previous life, "presents were always useful. The rock, for instance, would work if you could grind things with it." Her boyfriend laughs at this, and in this laughter the reader sees one source of the couple's undoing -- he has never had to endure serious deprivations or occupy himself with wholly practical concerns.
Life in America is not merely disorienting for Adichie's characters -- it can be as unjust as life in Nigeria. In "The Shivering," a Princeton graduate student named Ukamaka is befriended by a fellow Nigerian who lives in her building, a man who she assumes has problems similar to her own -- missing the harmattan season back home and enduring a bad breakup. In fact, Chinedu's problems involve a male lover who spurned him by marrying a woman, an impending deportation notice, and an inability to send money to his family since he lost his construction job. His apartment is furnished with nothing other than a couch and table; he has been telling Ukamaka he is "fasting" because he doesn't want to admit that he can't afford food. "The Arrangers of Marriage" describes a woman whose family commits her to a doctor in America, thinking they have done her a great favor. Ofodile, however, is demeaning and dictatorial, telling Chinaza that she must take an English name, learn to drink her tea without milk and sugar, and prepare meals from the Good Housekeeping All-American Cookbook because he doesn't want them to be known as "the people who fill the building with smells of foreign food." In contrast to Nkem, Chinaza learns to endure these indignities and worse from Ofodile because she cannot imagine how to make an independent life for herself in an unfamiliar country.
The stories set in Africa are the most vibrant here, as if in them Adichie is writing about a world that she loves, rather than one she wants to analyze. Her perspective is far from uncritical -- "A Private Experience" deals pointedly with the senselessness of a Muslim religious riot; "Tomorrow Is Too Far" shows how a rigidly patriarchal society leads a young girl to "mar the perfection" of her prized older brother -- but these tales also include glimpses of redemption that are harder to come by in America. In "Jumping Monkey Hill" the main character attends a writer's retreat at a lavish resort outside Capetown, where she learns to stand up to the condescending (and predatory) British professor who organizes it, a man who thinks that only stories about "killings" and "prurient violence" can be representative of the "real Africa." "The Headstrong Historian," one of the longest and most complex stories in the volume, features a scholar who takes control of her life by writing a new history of her people that supplants the colonial textbook she carried in her schoolbag. That book contained a chapter entitled "The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of Southern Nigeria," "by an administrator from Worcestershire who had lived among them for seven years." Her book is called Pacifying with Bullets.
Throughout, the author proves herself deft with the short story's demanding form -- too much so to be hemmed in. While many of her tales are compact and straightforward, others play fluidly with the genre's constraints. "The Headstrong Historian" is a standout, employing shifts in time and point of view to show how language itself (English versus Igbo, colonial versus indigenous histories) has been used to oppress. But in all cases these tales yield insight into power -- whether it's the hold one man may have over another, or the more intricately knotted struggles for dominance between groups. They are studies of displacement and belonging that show both how things fall apart and how one might make a tentative start at building individual lives anew. --Andrea Walker
Andrea Walker is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. Her reviews have appeared in Bookforum, The Hartford Courant, and the Times Literary Supplement.
