The thing around your neck

Review by New York Times Review

MIDWAY through Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first story collection, "The Thing Around Your Neck," a gentlemanly British professor who has convened a workshop of African writers at a resort near Cape Town pronounces a Tanzanian's story about massacres in Congo just the thing he wants for his magazine. "It was urgent and relevant," Adichie writes. "It brought news." The professor goes on to say that the story a Nigerian writer has submitted - about a bank clerk in Lagos who is asked to offer sexual favors to secure a new client - is "agenda writing." "Women are never victims in that sort of crude way." The young woman interrupts him to say that the story was in fact her own experience, and then walks out, leaving his leering glances behind. The tensions embodied in this moment - between fiction and autobiography, the expectations of the observer and the experience of the witness, not to mention the value of certain experiences in the global literary marketplace - practically seep through the pages of this collection. As a whole it traces the journey Adichie herself has taken. Brought up in the Nigerian college town of Nsukka, in the aftermath of the failed war for Biafran independence that killed two of her grandparents, she moved to the United States at 19 to attend college and had early literary success with her novels "Purple Hibiscus" and "Half of a Yellow Sun." All these personhoods are represented here: the sheltered child, the vulnerable immigrant in Philadelphia and Brooklyn, the foreign student adrift in a dormitory in Princeton, the young African writer asked to objectify herself for an uncomprehending audience. In this way Adichie traverses a landscape and a mode of writing we've seen before, in the work of - for example - Bharati Mukherjee, Amy Tan, Chitra Divakaruni and Jhumpa Lahiri. And as with these writers, there's occasionally the feeling that these stories exhaust themselves too soon; they collapse under the weight of all that can't be said in the terse, monochromatic sentences of the conventional Anglo-American short story. This is particularly the case in two stories about Nigerian women trapped in the United States by marriage, "Imitation" and "The Arrangers of Marriage." In both cases the narration reveals so little about the protagonists' inner lives that we begin to feel, a little uncomfortably, that Adichie is delivering the "news" the West wants to hear about Africa: pitiful victims, incorrigible villains, inspirational survivors. Thankfully, that feeling doesn't last long. "Ghosts," in which an elderly professor in Nsukka meets an old colleague he assumed had died in the Biafran war, is a nearly perfect story, distilling a lifetime's weariness and wicked humor into a few pages. "Tomorrow Is Too Far," a kind of ghostless ghost story, delves beautifully into the layers of deception around a young boy's accidental death, remembered by a young Nigerian- American woman who wants desperately to avoid her own culpability. And there is a whole suite of stories here in which Adichie calmly eviscerates the pretensions of Westerners whose interest in Africa masks an acquisitive, self-flattering venality. Adichie is keenly aware of the particular burdens that come with literary success for an immigrant writer, a so-called hyphenated American. Though in this book she strikes a tricky balance - exposing, while also at times playing on, her audience's prejudices - one comes away from "The Thing Around Your Neck" heartened by her self-awareness and unpredictability. She knows what it means to sit at the table, and also what it takes to walk away. Jess Row is the author of "The Train to Lo Wu," a collection of stories. He teaches at the College of New Jersey.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

As richly modulated as MacArthur fellow Adichie's hard-hitting novels are, her short stories are equally well-tooled and potent. As her first collection arcs between Nigeria and the U.S., Adichie takes measure of the divide between men and women and different classes and cultures. A meticulous observer of tactile detail and emotional nuance, Adichie moves sure-footedly from the personal to the communal as she illuminates with striking immediacy the consequences of prejudice, corruption, tyranny, and violence in war-torn Nigeria and unaware America. A teenage girl tells the harrowing story of her spoiled, frivolous brother's abrupt awakening to brutality and compassion in jail. A Nigerian woman living patiently in America with her children and without her husband finally breaks out of the chrysalis of her compliance. Two women from warring factions take shelter together during a riot. Adichie's graceful and slicing stories of characters struggling with fear, anger, and sorrow beautifully capture the immense resonance of small things as the larger world pitches into incoherence.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun) stays on familiar turf in her deflated first story collection. The tension between Nigerians and Nigerian-Americans, and the question of what it means to be middle-class in each country, feeds most of these dozen stories. Best known are "Cell One," and "The Headstrong Historian," which have both appeared in the New Yorker and are the collection's finest works. "Cell One," in particular, about the appropriation of American ghetto culture by Nigerian university students, is both emotionally and intellectually fulfilling. Most of the other stories in this collection, while brimming with pathos and rich in character, are limited. The expansive canvas of the novel suits Adichie's work best; here, she fixates mostly on romantic relationships. Each story's observations illuminate once; read in succession, they take on a repetitive slice-of-life quality, where assimilation and gender roles become ready stand-ins for what could be more probing work. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

This is a fine new collection of 12 short stories by the young Nigerian author of Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. The stories are set both in the United States and in Nigeria, where things continue to fall apart. A privileged college student gets involved in gang violence; innocent women flee from a bloody riot; some characters are visited by ghosts, while others are haunted by the memory of war. Yet as one character puts it, an easier life in the United States is cushioned by so much convenience that it feels sterile. Relations between the races are awkward at best. The title story probes the emotional gulf between a young immigrant woman and her well-off white American boyfriend. The closing story, "The Headstrong Historian," is a miniature portrait of the colonial legacy in Nigeria. Adichie, a brilliant writer whose characters stay with you for a long time, deserves to be more widely known. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/09.]-Leslie Patterson, Brown Univ. Lib., Providence, RI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A dozen stories about the lives of Nigerians at home and in America from the winner of the Orange Broadband Prize. In the five tales set in the United States, Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun, 2006, etc.) profiles characters both drawn to America and cautious of assimilation. "Imitation" centers on Nkem, who lives with her two Americanized children in a large house in the Philadelphia suburbs filled with reproductions of tribal masks (the originals are in British museums). Her husband visits from Nigeria for only a few months each year, and when she hears he has moved his girlfriend into their Lagos house, Nkem begins to consider the authenticity of her American life, wondering if it's too late to go home. In "The Arrangers of Marriage," a young woman arrives in New York with her brand-new husband, who seemed fine on paper but proves not to be quite what he claimed. Ofodile is not yet a doctor, just an intern; their "house" is a sparsely furnished apartment in Flatbush; and Dave, as he prefers to be called, has fairly stringent ideas of what it takes to be American, like no sugar in tea and no spicy smells polluting their hallway. The very fine "Jumping Monkey Hill" and the title story both show Nigerian women confronting white expectations. In the first, Ujunwa has won a stay at a writer's retreat outside Cape Town. The organizer, a British Africanist, has his own ideas as to what constitutes authentic African writinglesbians are out, revolution is inand does not like her tale of feminist struggle in Lagos. "The Thing Around Your Neck" refers to loneliness, which nearly chokes a young immigrant woman working as a waitress in Connecticut, but even as she feels its grip loosening, she remains wary of her new American boyfriend, "because white people who like Africa too much and those who like Africa too little were the samecondescending." Insightful and illuminating. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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CELL ONE The first time our house was robbed, it was our neighbor Osita who climbed in through the dining room window and stole our TV, our VCR, and the Purple Rain and Thriller videotapes my father had brought back from America. The second time our house was robbed, it was my brother Nnamabia who faked a break-in and stole my mother's jewelry. It happened on a Sunday. My parents had traveled to our hometown, Mbaise, to visit our grandparents, so Nnamabia and I went to church alone. He drove my mother's green Peugeot 504. We sat together in church as we usually did, but we did not nudge each other and stifle giggles about somebody's ugly hat or threadbare caftan, because Nnamabia left without a word after about ten minutes. He came back just before the priest said, "The Mass is ended. Go in peace." I was a little piqued. I imagined he had gone off to smoke and to see some girl, since he had the car to himself for once, but he could at least have told me where he was going. We drove home in silence and, when he parked in our long driveway, I stopped to pluck some ixora flowers while Nnamabia unlocked the front door. I went inside to find him standing still in the middle of the parlor. "We've been robbed!" he said in English. It took me a moment to understand, to take in the scattered room. Even then, I felt that there was a theatrical quality to the way the drawers were flung open, as if it had been done by somebody who wanted to make an impression on the discoverers. Or perhaps it was simply that I knew my brother so well. Later, when my parents came home and neighbors began to troop in to say ndo , and to snap their fingers and heave their shoulders up and down, I sat alone in my room upstairs and realized what the queasiness in my gut was: Nnamabia had done it, I knew. My father knew, too. He pointed out that the window louvers had been slipped out from the inside, rather than outside (Nnamabia was really much smarter than that; perhaps he had been in a hurry to get back to church before Mass ended), and that the robber knew exactly where my mother's jewelry was--the left corner of her metal trunk. Nnamabia stared at my father with dramatic, wounded eyes and said, "I know I have caused you both terrible pain in the past, but I would never violate your trust like this." He spoke English, using unnecessary words like "terrible pain" and "violate," as he always did when he was defending himself. Then he walked out through the back door and did not come home that night. Or the next night. Or the night after. He came home two weeks later, gaunt, smelling of beer, crying, saying he was sorry and he had pawned the jewelry to the Hausa traders in Enugu and all the money was gone. "How much did they give you for my gold?" my mother asked him. And when he told her, she placed both hands on her head and cried, "Oh! Oh! Chi m egbuo m! My God has killed me!" It was as if she felt that the least he could have done was get a good price. I wanted to slap her. My father asked Nnamabia to write a report: how he had sold the jewelry, what he had spent the money on, with whom he had spent it. I didn't think Nnamabia would tell the truth, and I don't think my father thought he would, either, but he liked reports, my professor father, he liked things written down and nicely documented. Besides, Nnamabia was seventeen, with a carefully tended beard. He was in that space between secondary school and university and was too old for caning. What else could my father have done? After Nnamabia wrote the report, my father filed it in the steel drawer in his study where he kept our school papers. "That he could hurt his mother like this" was the last thing my father said, in a mutter. But Nnamabia really hadn't set out to hurt her. He did it becaus Excerpted from The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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