Daily Independent (Lagos)
Yemi Adebisi
6 July 2009
Lagos — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will be in Nigeria this July to promote her new book, The Thing Around Your Neck. Published locally by Farafina Books, The Thing Around Your Neck is a collection of short stories exploring the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie's signature wisdom, the collision of cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them.
Award-winning author of Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been described as "the 21st century daughter of Chinua Achebe." Her much-anticipated public presentation of The Thing Around Your Neck will hold on Saturday July 11 by 3p.m, at the Silverbird Lifestyle Store, Silverbird Galleria, Ahmadu Bello Way, Victoria Island, Lagos.
The event marks the launch of Farafina Week, a weeklong celebration of Farafina Books, offering the best in contemporary African literature, at the Silverbird Lifestyle Store.
The Silverbird Lifestyle Store provides a serene shopping experience for music, film and book enthusiasts. It offers the widest and the deepest selection in Lagos of music, books, gaming and accessories, Apple products, magazines, stationery, and maps. Consumers can expect to find a store of impeccable taste and range with a combination of local and international offerings.
About The Thing Around Your Neck
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, which critics hailed as "one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years" (Baltimore Sun), with "prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes" (The Boston Globe); The Washington Post called her "the 21st century daughter of Chinua Achebe." Her award-winning Half of a Yellow Sun became an instant classic upon its publication three years later, once again putting her tremendous gifts, graceful storytelling, knowing compassion, and fierce insight into her characters' hearts, on display. Now, in her most intimate and seamlessly crafted work to date, Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in 12 dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.
In A Private Experience, a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears she's been pushing away. In Tomorrow is Too Far, a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brother's death. The young mother at the centre of "Imitation" finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when she learns that her husband has moved his mistress into their Lagos home. And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to re-examine them.
Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie's signature emotional wisdom, the clash of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them. The Thing Around Your Neck is a resounding confirmation of the prodigious literary powers of one of our most essential writers.
About The Author
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into 30 languages and has appeared in various publications, including The O. Henry Prize Stories, 2003; The New Yorker; Granta; the Financial Times; and Zoetrope. Her most recent novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Broadband Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; it was a New York Times Notable Book and a People and Black Issues Book Review Best Book of the Year. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Houston/Wright Legacy Award. A recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
Collected Editorial Reviews
"A vivid new collection by Adichie . . . In the tense and dramatic A Private Experience, two women, a young Christian Igbo girl from Lagos and a poor Muslim Hausa woman from the north, take refuge from a street riot in an empty shop and share lessons in survival. Ghosts [is] an accomplished and powerful story about honour and regret [that] sounds a long sad chord from the small world of the elderly, gently gathering wider implications into its brief compass. . . . [The stories set in America are] full of telling contrasts between the new world and 'home.' The most sophisticated story in the collection is Jumping Monkey Hill, which features an old English post-colonial couple who run an African writers' workshop outside Cape Town. [It] has a wryly-humorous story within a story, and ends, like many of the tales here, with the protagonist walking away from compromise. Whether in the land of the free or under military rule, women are the main victims of casual lechery, arranged marriages, cheating husbands and violence. When women talk to each other they share more than gossip and information; they are bound together in powerlessness. The long final story, The Headstrong Historian, a compact tragic family saga, ends on a faint note of hope with an educated granddaughter. With its warm and sympathetic heroines and its finely cadenced prose, this collection demonstrates that (Adichie) is keeping faith with her talent and with her country."
Lindsay Duguid, The Sunday Times (London)
"Superb, with minimal fuss (these stories) present snapshots of Nigerian life. The title story tracks the life of a young woman sent to the U.S. by her family. It is memorably, heartbreakingly sad. Both as a person and a writer, (Adichie) is engaged in an ongoing project of rebellion against the expectations of others, of those who want to be able to tell her what the world is like, and what her place in it should be."
William Skidelsky, The Observer (UK)
"The success of (Half of a Yellow Sun) cemented Adichie's status as an incredibly gifted storyteller and her stories add further confirmation. Adichie's work is reminiscent of that of novelists Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri in that her fiction is largely concerned with the clash of cultures and the immigrant experience in America. Like the author's life this collection is divided between America and her West African homeland. Each is a perfect nugget, telling a complete story in some 20 pages. Simple but beautiful, the stories tackle everything from corrupt police and riots to infidelity and arranged marriages. While she writes of Nigeria with affection, Adichie never sees it through rose-tinted spectacles. The stories are compelling and diverse but make up a mere 218 pages, leaving the reader wanting more from this major African talent."
Lianne Kolirin, Daily Express (UK)
"The title of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short story collection intrigues even before you open the covers. Adichie has written of gang violence and police brutality in her native Nigeria, of deceived wives and old men remembering the Biafran War, and of a Muslim and a Christian woman forming a momentary bond while religious riots rage outside their hiding place. Adichie's spare, poised prose, the coolness of her phrasing, ensures these scenes are achieved without melodrama. And though she writes very specifically about Nigeria, the stories have a universal application. The Thing Around Your Neck explores myriad tensions between new world and old. Adichie's tales explore an array of power struggles, and often the story's kick comes from the shifting of that power, the moment of realisation or choice that will result in changed lives. It's the hint at these lives beyond the final lines that reminds one of what a good novelist Adichie is. There are many characters you would like to travel with further."
Isobel Dixon, Financial Times
"A fortunate few writers possess the rare but unmistakable quality of inspiring a reader's confidence within a few sentences. It is a curious, almost unliterary trait: like meeting a person whom one knows is going to become a friend. The secret is not one of content or style (though Adichie is a stylist of deceptively effortless grace who seems to manipulate language almost invisibly, so that it is only later that her careful craftsmanship becomes apparent). Her particular gift is the seductive ability to tell a story. Adichie's narratives have something of the compelling allure, at once intimate and strange, of a crossed telephone line. It is as though the reader has dropped into the lives of her young women (the majority of her narrators are young and female) and become immediately absorbed into their imagined world. Her characters have the power of archetypes and the verisimilitude that comes from fine observation. Adichie writes with an economy and precision that makes the strange seem familiar. She makes storytelling seem as easy as birdsong."
Jane Shilling, The Daily Telegraph
"Almost every story (in The Thing Around Your Neck), in the way only the most satisfying short stories manage, holds the kernel of something bigger in its fist yet is simultaneously a fully realised, standalone entity. They don't aspire to be novels that would be a bad thing, but they hum with potential. I longed to know more about each struggling, grieving character as I turned the last page of each compact and uncompromising tale. And I mean that as a compliment. Adichie is already, at the age of 31, a formidable voice in contemporary West African literature, described by Nigerian heavyweight Chinua Achebe as "a writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers." In the title story that gift is skilfully employed in her use of the second person tense, not easily pulled off. Even when describing something horrific, Adichie remains dispassionate and the control and distance she maintains are what make her such a good writer. At its best Adichie's prose can be breathtaking in the most literal, physical sense. In both (the U.S. and Africa), Adichie's preoccupation is with class, and this is why her voice is so refreshing. Her interests lie in middle class Nigeria and the Diaspora, and she tugs us out of the one-dimensional representation of Africa, the poverty, disease and civil war, that we are usually fed."
Chitra Ramaswamy, Scotland on Sunday
"Adichie grew up in Nigeria; she now lives in the United States. Several stories in her new book engineer a kind of moralising comedy by viewing one country from the perspective of the other, an elegant collection. From beginning to end the prose is serene and the characterisation deft."
Anthony Cummins, The Times Literary Supplement
Source: Kachifo
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