skygiants

I've loved everything I've read by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, so it is not a huge surprise that I also thought Americanah, her latest (and most widely-read?) novel, was frankly stellar.

Americanah is primarily the story of Ifemelu, a Nigerian young woman who manages to get a visa to go to college in America and, after several difficult years, becomes internet-famous when she starts a blog titled "Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black."

It's also secondarily the story of her high school/college boyfriend/possible one true love, Obinze, who does not manage to get a visa to go to America, and instead ends up in London as an undocumented immigrant having an experience that is some ways wildly different from Ifemelu's, and in some ways depressingly similar.

I read this book for a book club and it was an excellent selection because there is a ton to talk about -- the scathing portraits of racism and global imperalism and classism, and also Chimananda Ngozi Adichie's truly stellar character portraits. We kept coming back to how well she draws even the most minor character, with a kind of ruthless complexity that makes everyone at least a little bit sympathetic and also everyone at least a little bit morally complicit. (We talked a lot about Ifemelu's American boyfriends, who are maybe the best examples of this; the first one is a rich and handsome and deeply clueless white guy who does not really understand a single thing most of the time except on the brief occasions that he does, and the second is an upper-class black American professor who is consumed with the need to do the morally correct action at all times, down to choosing a cereal brand. Both of them, in very different ways, are very understandable and quite sympathetic and kind of horrible.)

Personally, I was really struck by the way all the characters not only changed throughout the book, but frequently looked quite different from the outside and inside. The way Ifemelu and Obinze see each other is not wrong, exactly, but it's obviously not the same as the way they see themselves -- which seems obvious when I put it like that but is the kind of thing in writing that I feel like is really hard to do in the way that Adichie does it, which not only makes you go 'oh, yes, of course that's how people are' but also makes you look at all the side characters with the understanding that almost certainly there is stuff going on in their heads that allows them to explain their actions to themselves.

Also Adichie is really, REALLY good at writing about writing, about the role that Ifemelu takes as self-described Outside Observer, and specifically about writing a blog on the internet and the ways this sort of takes over thought processes such that an event happens and the first thing you do in your head is start composing the blog entry (or funny tweet, or tumblr post, or whatever) that you're going to write about it. I totally do this, and I bet some of you do it too.

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.