(no subject)

I have a suspicion you will be seeing posts starting with "Thank you, schiarire!" around here quite a bit in the future. This is because Ji recced me an enormously long list of books a month or so and I am just starting to work my way through them. The first was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, and it was unsurprisingly amazing.

I have a short attention span sometimes and occasionally get a bit bored by stories about people living their social lives and having subtle emotional issues while not much else happens, so it says something about how amazing Adichie is at drawing character that I was pretty riveted even through the first section of the book, which is all about setting up the characters in their emotionally complicated but relatively complacent lives. There are three viewpoint characters - Olanna, a wealthy, British-educated Igbo woman who is in love with the vocally anti-colonialist professor Odenigbo; Ugwu, Odenigbo's teenaged houseboy, from a small village but in love with the intellectual lifestyle he has become a part of; and Richard, a hapless British would-be author who is in love with Igbo art and with Olanna's estranged twin sister Kainene. Odenigbo and Kainene never get viewpoints, but they are just as central to the story as the three viewpoint characters, all of whom spend massive amounts of time trying to figure out what Odenigbo and Kainene are thinking. (Kainene, who is sharp and sarcastic and hardcore, was unsurprisingly my favorite, but both Richard and Olanna were easy for me to identify with in ways that struck uncomfortably close to home.)

The first part of the book, as I said, establishes the characters and their dynamics and their world and the various small changes in their lives - Olanna moves in with Odenigbo and teaches Ugwu to cook, Richard starts a relationship with Kainene and becomes part of Odenigbo's circle, and so on. Then there is a timeskip and abruptly we are on the verge of the series of coups that kicked off the establishment of Biafra, the short-lived independent Igbo republic. Because we have spent so much time with these characters already, it's incredibly powerful to see the events of the coups and the war that follows through their eyes and how it changes them. There were one or two plot choices I had problems with as I was reading through, but pretty much every one of them resulted in an incredible payoff. Unsurprisingly, much of the second half of the book is very brutal and hard to read at times, but it is so very worth it.