BOOK REVIEW
The Thing Around your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a collection of a dozen short stories, each one a complete 'slice of life'. This is the first Adichie book I am reading, I prefer picking up a short stories collection when I am reading an author for the first time; and Adichie has convinced me to pick all her books with this one.
The writing is lucid, prose crisp and characters neatly etched in all twelve stories, my top favorites being - The Headstrong Historian, The American Embassy, Tomorrow is too Far, Jumping Monkey Hill, The Thing Around your Neck, Ghosts, A Private Experience, The Arrangers of Marriage.
Adichie's writing broadly speaks of Nigerians, their lives in their strife torn land riddled with corruption and all societal ills and Nigerian immigrants in America, struggling to get to the mainstream.
Prima facie, one's head might process this book like Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies which talks of Indians, more precisely Bengalis, both in homeland and in a land away from it.
But as stories unfurl, we realise that Adichie's writing reveals essential, distinguishing socio-political information of Nigeria in the backdrop, about cult culture in the story Cell One, of ethnic and religious clashes between Igbo Christians and Hausa Muslims in A Private Experience, the Biafran war in Ghosts, about pro democracy war and general Abacha's regime in the American Embassy, about a fateful day when an airplane crash coincides with Nigeria's first lady's death in the Shivering. Also, Jumping Monkey Hill briefs about eminent writers in African writers circle. There is a decent plethora of information on culture, local beliefs, cuisine, what traditional names imply apart from mere detailing of subtle human emotions; and this earns the book a BIG thumbs up.
For me, this book was a fulfilling read.As stated on the cover - Adichie makes story telling seem as easy as bird song, attractive tunes come from its pages, some melancholic, some little cheerful, all nevertheless with an upright dose of hope and optimism.
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