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queenluaMasterful, in that I marveled at the sheer number and variety of stories Adichie was telling, how she had woven together so many lives, cities, and places, and managed to make it all hang together.
Fascinating, in that the subject matter was primarily things that I know very little about (I’ve never been to Nigeria; I’ve only barely been to London; I’ve never been on a student visa; I’ve never overstayed my visa and done the whole undocumented-worker thing; I’ve never been a professor in a country that’s suffering brain drain from repeated government coups; I’ve never been a doctor navigating the hell of the US’s medical credentialing system to try and transfer my medical license from Nigeria to the US; I’ve never braided hair or been to a hair-braiding salon...).
And the bits that I was familiar with rang amusingly true (Adichie nails genuinely-well-meaning-yet-awkward upper-class white culture, and she nails the weird sort of parties and potlocks that grad students and academics get up to, with all their amusing Big Ideas and intellectual puffery).
Yet, near the end of the novel, I felt a vague nagging sense of remove—I was admiring this novel like a mountain, like something distant and beautiful, and yet I wanted to be closer. Why didn’t it all feel more immediate?
I felt like I must be missing something, until I chatted with a friend who’d also read the book—she said it was masterful (yes), said she was glad she read it (yes same), and said it also felt a touch... cold (yes!). But, she continued, she liked that—when narratives get feels-y, they often start feeling mawkish, to her, so she liked that thin layer of remove. (She’s a voracious reader of dense nonfiction histories, for a sense of her wider reading preferences.)
This makes sense enough to me. I have a pretty well-known preference for bombast and melodrama, and that’s not how this book leans. But its attention to detail and nigh-War-and-Peace scope still make it something I’m glad I read.
I’d thus cautiously recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject matter, and I’d enthusiastically recommend it to anyone who shares that aesthetic preference—who wants a story told straight, and perhaps a touch distantly, but very true. I saw someone comment that this should be regarded as a Great American Novel and, yeah, I can see this as a candidate.
That’s the high-level view; now for my own personal natterings:
* Ifemelu’s relationship with Blaine, an African-American college professor, was the most interesting part of the book to me, personally. Probably because I relate to academics too much, despite never being one; my sympathies generally lie with those who overintellectualize their problems and reside in overly-earnest enclaves. I related a lot to his general insistence on nuance, his tendency to reply to Ifemelu’s half-baked ideas with overserious consideration... and yet, it’s also obvious to a reader that Blaine is half missing-the-point and half not understanding Ifemelu at all. Her blog posts aren’t meant for consumption by gentle academics; they’re for frustrated people who just want someone to say, hey, here’s how I see it, here’s how it is. And Blaine’s pushing on this means he’s pushing too much on their relationship; thus when their relationship ends, it’s sad but it makes sense, they’re just different.
* Ifemelu’s return to Lagos is also quite beautiful—beautiful in a way that only a novel can be, because the power of her return lies in just how much has happened and changed during the previous several-hundred pages. Only when we see her in the context of Nigeria, do we see how earnest she’s become, how outspoken she’s become, how different... and I ached a little, reading that, because while my home isn’t nearly as far as the distance between New Haven and Lagos, the general sense of “wow God I changed into something so different from this and I didn’t even notice” rings painfully familiar.
* Plenty reviews of this book remark on Ifemelu’s blog posts, finding them tendentious and repetitive. I didn’t find them grating, personally—perhaps because they don’t read that differently than stuff you’d read on a mildly spicy day on Tumblr. But, furthermore, I think other reviewers think that Adichie = her main character, given their superficial similarities, and are chafing against the apparent mouthpiecing going on—but I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. In fact, this is where that slight touch of coldness serves the author well. The blog posts are simply there because they’re part of Ifemelu’s life and thus they’re part of the story. Rather than just mouthpiecing, I think the blog posts are instrumental in showing how Ifemelu becomes more “American,” and, yaknow, starting a #hottakes blog in your 20’s is something a lot of people do, right?
Like, if Adichie herself wanted to use the narrative to dunk on the targets that Ifemelu goes after in her blog, well, the family that Ifemelu serves as a nanny for during college would’ve been an easy target. Instead, the author very determinedly portrays that family as fundamentally decent, certainly not without issues or absurdities or cringiness, but they’re not characictures and they’re not just targets; the narrative refuses an easy answer of “god, clueless rich people, amirite.”
* god Shan sounds like such a bitch but i would absolutely also hang out with her and go to all her parties if I could
* As a minor grouse, I will say my attention lagged a bit around the middle—for such a large commitment, you really want the story to feel like a story and at times it feels more like a collection of vignettes . Things picked up a lot when Obinze re-entered the narrative, though, which happened soon enough.
Fascinating, in that the subject matter was primarily things that I know very little about (I’ve never been to Nigeria; I’ve only barely been to London; I’ve never been on a student visa; I’ve never overstayed my visa and done the whole undocumented-worker thing; I’ve never been a professor in a country that’s suffering brain drain from repeated government coups; I’ve never been a doctor navigating the hell of the US’s medical credentialing system to try and transfer my medical license from Nigeria to the US; I’ve never braided hair or been to a hair-braiding salon...).
And the bits that I was familiar with rang amusingly true (Adichie nails genuinely-well-meaning-yet-awkward upper-class white culture, and she nails the weird sort of parties and potlocks that grad students and academics get up to, with all their amusing Big Ideas and intellectual puffery).
Yet, near the end of the novel, I felt a vague nagging sense of remove—I was admiring this novel like a mountain, like something distant and beautiful, and yet I wanted to be closer. Why didn’t it all feel more immediate?
I felt like I must be missing something, until I chatted with a friend who’d also read the book—she said it was masterful (yes), said she was glad she read it (yes same), and said it also felt a touch... cold (yes!). But, she continued, she liked that—when narratives get feels-y, they often start feeling mawkish, to her, so she liked that thin layer of remove. (She’s a voracious reader of dense nonfiction histories, for a sense of her wider reading preferences.)
This makes sense enough to me. I have a pretty well-known preference for bombast and melodrama, and that’s not how this book leans. But its attention to detail and nigh-War-and-Peace scope still make it something I’m glad I read.
I’d thus cautiously recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject matter, and I’d enthusiastically recommend it to anyone who shares that aesthetic preference—who wants a story told straight, and perhaps a touch distantly, but very true. I saw someone comment that this should be regarded as a Great American Novel and, yeah, I can see this as a candidate.
That’s the high-level view; now for my own personal natterings:
* Ifemelu’s relationship with Blaine, an African-American college professor, was the most interesting part of the book to me, personally. Probably because I relate to academics too much, despite never being one; my sympathies generally lie with those who overintellectualize their problems and reside in overly-earnest enclaves. I related a lot to his general insistence on nuance, his tendency to reply to Ifemelu’s half-baked ideas with overserious consideration... and yet, it’s also obvious to a reader that Blaine is half missing-the-point and half not understanding Ifemelu at all. Her blog posts aren’t meant for consumption by gentle academics; they’re for frustrated people who just want someone to say, hey, here’s how I see it, here’s how it is. And Blaine’s pushing on this means he’s pushing too much on their relationship; thus when their relationship ends, it’s sad but it makes sense, they’re just different.
* Ifemelu’s return to Lagos is also quite beautiful—beautiful in a way that only a novel can be, because the power of her return lies in just how much has happened and changed during the previous several-hundred pages. Only when we see her in the context of Nigeria, do we see how earnest she’s become, how outspoken she’s become, how different... and I ached a little, reading that, because while my home isn’t nearly as far as the distance between New Haven and Lagos, the general sense of “wow God I changed into something so different from this and I didn’t even notice” rings painfully familiar.
* Plenty reviews of this book remark on Ifemelu’s blog posts, finding them tendentious and repetitive. I didn’t find them grating, personally—perhaps because they don’t read that differently than stuff you’d read on a mildly spicy day on Tumblr. But, furthermore, I think other reviewers think that Adichie = her main character, given their superficial similarities, and are chafing against the apparent mouthpiecing going on—but I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. In fact, this is where that slight touch of coldness serves the author well. The blog posts are simply there because they’re part of Ifemelu’s life and thus they’re part of the story. Rather than just mouthpiecing, I think the blog posts are instrumental in showing how Ifemelu becomes more “American,” and, yaknow, starting a #hottakes blog in your 20’s is something a lot of people do, right?
Like, if Adichie herself wanted to use the narrative to dunk on the targets that Ifemelu goes after in her blog, well, the family that Ifemelu serves as a nanny for during college would’ve been an easy target. Instead, the author very determinedly portrays that family as fundamentally decent, certainly not without issues or absurdities or cringiness, but they’re not characictures and they’re not just targets; the narrative refuses an easy answer of “god, clueless rich people, amirite.”
* As a minor grouse, I will say my attention lagged a bit around the middle—for such a large commitment, you really want the story to feel like a story and at times it feels more like a collection of vignettes . Things picked up a lot when Obinze re-entered the narrative, though, which happened soon enough.
