On the Coffee Table: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Title: Americanah

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

via Amazon

Ifemelu and Obinze fell in love as teenagers in Lagos.  Life paths lead in separate directions, as they do when you're young.  Ifemelu went to the United States where she became a successful blogger (huzzah!) and a Princeton fellow.  Obinze went to Britain where his undocumented status never allowed him to settle comfortably so he went back to Nigeria and got rich in real estate.  That's the story in short but the summary hardly does it justice.

Adichie paints vivid pictures of all three countries, particularly the Black experience in each.  As whenever I read anything about Africa, I was quickly reminded of the breadth of my own ignorance.  For starters, I have failed to grasp just how many people live in Nigeria.  "One in five Africans is Nigerian," a cab driver says to Ifemelu.  It's actually closer to one in six but point taken.  It's bigger physically than I imagined, too: 10+ hour drives to get from one part of the country to another.  Adichie describes some of the things one expects of a developing nation: corruption, cronyism, run-down buildings. (Hmm, is the US really so different?)  But she also shares details about the food and the music she clearly loves as much as her characters do.

She also writes wonderfully about the foreignness of both the US and UK, so easy to forget for those of us who have lived in either country for most of our lives.  In fact, with all three nations, she demonstrates that it often takes an outsider to see the truth.  Even in Nigeria, Ifemelu sees her native land quite differently upon her return.

The prose is wonderfully intimate.  Halfway through, I was rather surprised to realize the entire book is written in third person rather than first.  That's how intimate it feels.  I have lived some of it, though the expat experience of a White man in Japan is considerably different from that of a Black person pretty much anywhere.  I have a couple passages to share.

First, from Obinze's experience at a dinner party in London:  "They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction... were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty."

Later, from one of Ifemelu's blog posts:

The simplest solution to the problem of race in America?  Romantic love.  Not friendship.  Not the kind of safe, shallow love where the objective is that both people remain comfortable.  But real deep romantic love, the kind that twists you and wrings you out and makes you breathe through the nostrils of your beloved.  And because that real deep romantic love is so rare, and because American society is set up to make it even rarer between American Black and American White, the problem of race in America will never be solved.

On Goodreads, I gave the book a 4, though it's a high 4.  I didn't lose myself in it quite as much as I wanted to but there's no denying its quality.  Highly recommended.