Despite the fascinating combination of post–civil war Nigeria and good gossip, Atta’s novel can’t quite overcome the ennui...
A glimpse into the insular world of upper-class Nigeria during the mid-1970s.
Remi Lawal is a middle-aged shop owner living in the exclusive Ikoyi neighborhood of Lagos in 1976. When she meets Frances Cooke, an American art dealer who has come to Nigeria to collect beads that are seemingly valuable to everyone but Nigerians, it begins a series of tête-à-têtes between the two in which Remi describes life among Nigeria’s elite while Frances offers comparatively little about herself. What looms over Remi’s descriptions of Nigerian life, however, is the question of whether Frances is a CIA agent, an idea initially floated by Remi’s husband, Tunde, a banker who has recently been “retired” from his government job due to a military coup. Despite Tunde’s understandable suspicions, Remi is unconvinced and proceeds to invite Frances into her inner circle, wherein larger questions of colonialism, marriage, motherhood, and Nigerian identity are interwoven with the everyday occurrences that make up Remi’s rather privileged life. Unfortunately, the award-winning Atta (A Bit of Difference, 2012), though meticulous in rehearsing the various maneuvers that have gotten Nigeria to this moment, overburdens the first half of the novel with details of Remi’s daily life that could have been left on the cutting-room floor. The novel doesn’t really find its legs until the second half, when it finally crescendos with yet another coup and an incident at a golf club, in which Frances plays a key role, which could rival a reality-TV show starring bored and moneyed housewives.
Despite the fascinating combination of post–civil war Nigeria and good gossip, Atta’s novel can’t quite overcome the ennui that dominates the life of its main character.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62371-985-2
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
None
Cornelius Buddy Suttree shares the three-fold plight of nearly all Cormac McCarthy heroes: he is an unregenerate loner-outsider, his unwavering isolation is never fully accounted for, and his present life and station are described with a poetic force that at once overwhelms and repels analysis. Suttree has left his well-to-do Knoxville family, has bought an old houseboat, and makes his living off the fiver as a fisherman (it is the early 1950s). We follow him for three years through layerings of experience that have very little effect on his character. Suttree lives among the most submerged folks ever born to crawl and die in fiction, "thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees—" as he is told while next to death from typhoid fever. His is a very long story with no plot, only episodes in the workhouse, fishing, spending the time of day with ragpickers, white trash, and bottom-dog blacks, drinking and puking, coming into money through an inheritance (only $300) or through a whore who falls for him but goes out of her mind. Only one other character stands out: young Harrogate, a Snopesian hayseed arrested for intercourse with watermelons— a splendid comic creation. McCarthy's idiosyncratic vocabulary and chronic verbal excesses will put off a lot of readers, but there is a cumulative power and occasional beauty in the relentless wretchedness that Suttree and his biographer wallow in.
None NonePub Date: Feb. 1, 1978
ISBN: 0679736328
Page Count: 481
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1978
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
Twin sisters cut adrift in a perilous, duplicitous world learn that “only the wise survive.” A formidable debut.
When things fall apart, four modern Nigerian siblings will need cunning to survive.
In this piercing, supple debut, a Nigerian father is scammed into ruin, and his wife, wearing her "favorite perfume, Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door," soon flees to New York. The couple had honeymooned in Spain and lived a comfortable life, but “my family unraveled rapidly,” says their daughter Ariyike, “in messy loose knots, hastening away from one another, shamefaced and lonesome, injured solitary animals in a happy world.” Ariyike sells water on the Lagos streets while her sister scrubs hospital toilets, their younger brothers both hungry and in need of school fees. All subsist with their complaining Yoruba grandmother. In a riveting sequence, Bibike helps her twin, Ariyike, transform into Keke to audition for an on-air radio job. A male acquaintance advises: “Dress sexy, be confident, smell nice, and if you are offered something to drink, ask for water first....If they insist, ask for something foreign and healthy, like green tea.” Keke isn’t chosen but leverages a position anyway by trading sex and plying her encyclopedic knowledge of Luke’s and Matthew’s Gospels. Thus begins her rise in Christian radio. Sex—often predatory—forms and deforms all four siblings; the novel features several rapes. Chapters alternate in each sibling’s voice over a stretch of 20 years. The brothers grow up and move to Chicago and out of the story. Abraham stuffs her novel past brimming, but its sophisticated structure and propulsive narration allow her to tuck in a biting critique of corrupt colonial religion and universally exploitative men. “It was fortunate to be beautiful and desired,” says Bibike, whose voice opens the story. “It made people smile at me. I was used to strangers wishing me well. But what is a girl’s beauty, but a man’s promise of reward?” Bibike eventually becomes a healer who cherishes their Yoruba grandmother while Keke, the wife of a powerful and monstrous pastor, tastes ashes—the source of the novel’s title.
Twin sisters cut adrift in a perilous, duplicitous world learn that “only the wise survive.” A formidable debut.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948226-56-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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