Comparisons of Habila to Nigeria’s great novelist Chinua Achebe are, to put it mildly, premature. But he’s an obviously...
A young Nigerian intellectual collides with his country’s brutal military regime, in this intense first novel by a native African writer now living in London.
Lomba is a Lagos journalist and would-be novelist whom we meet in 1997, when he’s imprisoned on fabricated charges, sunk in depression, which is recorded faithfully in his diary—and appropriated by the prison superintendent, who coaxes “Love Poems” out of Lomba, then sends them to his own mistress. Thereafter, the tale moves (rather chaotically) about in time as Habila focuses on: Lomba’s friend Bola, whose reckless antigovernment speeches destroy his life; the woman Lomba loves but cannot marry because she’s promised to another, an older man who pays her ailing mother’s medical bills; Lomba’s tenure at a magazine of arts and politics, The Dial (whose harried editor admonishes the idealistic young writer with “Everything is politics in this country, don’t forget that”); and the experiences of Kela, a teenaged delinquent sent to Lagos to live with relatives, who encounters Lomba just prior to the protest demonstration and consequent bloodbath that send Lomba to prison (his “crime”: observing and reporting the aforementioned demonstration). The “angel” for whom Lomba thereafter passively waits is the Angel of Death—as we’re reminded by far too many sententious generalizations about freedom stifled and “the stymied, sense-dulling miasma of existence.” Fortunately, these are offset by Habila’s gift for vivid sensory descriptions and employment of a rich pattern of images in which birds and flight suggest energy and escape, but also the elusiveness of loved and desired things; how swiftly and completely they can vanish.
Comparisons of Habila to Nigeria’s great novelist Chinua Achebe are, to put it mildly, premature. But he’s an obviously committed and serious writer: on balance, a more than worthy debut.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05193-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
The perfect feminist blockbuster for our times.
A decade in the life of a smart, earnest young woman trying to make her way in the world.
On Greer Kadetsky’s first weekend at Ryland College—a mediocre school she’s attending because her parents were too feckless to fill out Yale’s financial aid form—she gets groped at a frat party. This isn’t the life she was meant to lead: “You [need] to find a way to make your world dynamic,” she thinks. Then Greer meets Faith Frank, a second-wave feminist icon who’s come to speak at Ryland. During the question-and-answer period, Greer stands up to recount her assault and the college’s lackluster response, and, later, Faith gives her a business card. Like a magical amulet in a fairy tale, that card leads Greer to a whole new life: After graduation, she gets a job working for Faith’s foundation, Loci, which sponsors conferences about women’s issues. That might not be the most cutting-edge approach to feminism, Greer knows, but it will help her enter the conversation. Wolitzer (Belzhar, 2014, etc.) likes to entice readers with strings of appealing adjectives and juicy details: Faith is both “rich, sophisticated, knowledgeable” and “intense and serious and witty,” and she always wears a pair of sexy suede boots. It’s easy to fall in love with her, and with Greer, and with Greer’s boyfriend, Cory, and her best friend, Zee: They’re all deep, interesting characters who want to find ways to support themselves while doing good in the world and having meaningful, pleasurable lives. They have conversations about issues like “abortion rights, and the composition of the Senate, and about human trafficking”; they wrestle with the future of feminism, with racism and classism. None of them is perfect. “Likability has become an issue for women lately,” Greer tells an English professor while she’s still at Ryland, and Wolitzer has taken up the challenge. Her characters don’t always do the right thing, and though she has compassion for all of them, she’s ruthless about revealing their compromises and treacheries. This symphonic book feels both completely up-to-the-minute and also like a nod to 1970s feminist classics such as The Women’s Room, with a can't-put-it-down plot that illuminates both its characters and larger social issues.
The perfect feminist blockbuster for our times.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59448-840-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
PROFILES
Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.
A sweetly caustic first novel from a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and n+1.
It’s fall 1995, and Selin is just starting her first year at Harvard. One of the first things she learns upon arriving at her new school is that she has an email account. Her address contains her last name, “Karada?, but all lowercase, and without the Turkish ?, which was silent.” When presented with an Ethernet cable, she asks “What do we do with this, hang ourselves?” All of this occurs on the first page of Batuman’s (The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, 2011) debut novel, and it tells us just about everything we need to know about the author’s thematic concerns and style. Selin’s closest friends at Harvard are Ralph, a ridiculously handsome young man with a Kennedy fetish, and Svetlana, a Serbian from Connecticut. Selin’s first romantic entanglement—which begins via electronic mail—is with Ivan, a Hungarian mathematician she meets in Russian class. Selin studies linguistics and literature, teaches ESL, and spends a lot of time thinking about what language—and languages—can and cannot do. This isn’t just bloodless philosophizing, though. Selin is, among other things, a young woman trying to figure out the same things young people are always trying to figure out. And, as it happens, Selin is delightful company. She’s smart enough to know the ways in which she is dumb, and her off-kilter relationship to the world around her is revelatory and, often, mordantly hilarious. For example, this is how she describes a particular linguistics class: “we learned about people who had lost the ability to combine morphemes, after having their brains perforated by iron poles. Apparently there were several such people, who got iron poles stuck in their heads and lived to tell the tale—albeit without morphemes.” Some readers may get impatient with the slow pace of the narrative, which feels more like a collection of connected microfictions than a traditional novel, but readers who are willing to travel with Selin at her own contemplative pace will be grateful that they did.
Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59420-561-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
PROFILES
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