Some like it hot

I could not stop reading this clever, intricate and startling novel.

Set in Singapore, we meet three Nigerian women: Dara, a lawyer happily concentrating on reaching the apex of her career; Amaka, a banker and Lillian, a housewife desperately trying to save her marriage. Each of them is weighed down by a past that is holding them back and which we discover slowly as more and more layers of experience are peeled away. Then, out of the blue, another Nigerian enters their lives and the effect is dynamic.

Kehinde Fadipe holds the reader in the palm of her hand, each new page reveals another aspect of the hot and sticky lives of her characters. Singapore has many advantages, it is a polyglot society with none of the racial stigma attached to skin colour as in America, which is where Lillian grew up, where Amaka’s mother lives, so these women have sloughed off at least one setback.

In Such Tremendous Heat presents a life of apparent wealth, comfort and security for a small group of women. Apart from Lillian, though she is not without resources, the women we meet are all wealthy, they have good professional jobs, nice apartments and seem to have very settled and satisfactory lives – until it all begins to unravel. The pivot is a party given in an exceptionally grand apartment garden by one of their wealthiest friends, who it turns out, also know the new face on the block from way back in Nigeria.

Booker Longlist 2023/4

First I apologise to the author – I am not able to replicate the diacritics required for the names in the Nigerian languages.

This is a brave novel by any standards. Gripping as a narrative and rather terrifying in its exposure of Nigerian society. Ayobami Adelbayo (and if you look at the cover you will see what I mean about diacritics) has chosen to place her story in a contemporary city. Two families so far apart in status and wealth, that you would think their lives could never touch each other, are linked by a violent event.

A Spell of Good Things covers two main themes: the extremity of poverty as it touches upon the life of Eniola and his sister, Busola. Their father has been unemployed ever since the education system was reorganised and thousands of teachers were made redundant at a stroke. Ever since then, the family have been unable to pay for the most ordinary things, food, rent and the school fees. The mother has sold everything she can, and they are reduced to begging. The other theme is that of wealth and politics and how they are inextricably combined. This family we meet mostly through the daughter, a doctor who is working through her residency. Her elder brother has decided not to follow his medical training, but to pursue a different career as a newscaster, a profession that his parents disregard.

An example of the distinct bravery of this book is its casual exposure of endemic corruption, bribery and violence. In an early scene, Wuraola’s father is approached by his friend Professor Coker for support in his political campaign. Otumba refuses, explaining that he has been supporting the other candidate for years, and for business reasons cannot change sides now as he will lose all the lucrative contracts that he has benefitted from, through that financial arrangement.

However, the Fates have other ideas. The narrative arc forces the reader to consider all the options available to these characters in this highly stratified and ceremonial society. The elders live with a code in which status and birth are of paramount importance, but as anything can happen, the wives would be wise to prepare for the worst – hence the hoarding of gold jewellery against a rainy day.

There are many words that describe dress, food and family relationships which are in (I think) Yoruba; whole phrases are not translated, though one can roughly guess the meanings. Lengthy discussions of colours and materials to be selected for important events are fascinating, and one would benefit from a short glossary because many of the items of clothing are quite unique and cannot be guessed at. I would love to know what some of the meals that are described were made up of.

This is a breathtaking piece of writing, an unputdownable novel. The writing has pace, wisdom and compassion but does not shrink from the truth, whether in the personal, professional or political relationships that grind out the trajectory of this extraordinary book.

Booker Longlist 2019-10 to 12

It may seem perverse to still post on the Longlist when the Shortlist has been published, but these three only made onto the bookstands a week or so before this happened. Notably, one title is not yet published: Margaret Atwood‘s The Testaments.

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So to the last three but one. Salman Rushdie Quichotte, this signals in its title that it is yet another retelling of a classic story. Even if you have never read the Spanish original Don Quixote, the story is so well know that it has added to our language: quixotic and tilting at windmills to name two. Rushdie has transposed this to modern day America, not a straight swop. A writer of spy thrillers, Sam Duchamp, creates a character Quichotte who falls in love with a TV star and sets off on a quest to prove that he is worthy of her love. I didn’t like The Golden House much and this is a similar type of novel, indeed I am given to understand that it is part of a trilogy. It is rather over written.

Chigozie Obioma also has a man driven by love to try to make himself worthy of the woman he loves. The whole novel is deeply imbued with Nigerian and Igbo cosmology. The narrator is the chi, or guardian soul of the man – a poultry farmer called Chinonso, the chi is appealing to the greater spirits because Chinonso had made a terrible error with regard to Ndali, the woman who he loves beyond all measure. Once you get into the rhythm of the words it becomes a story of love, humiliation and madness. It is heart wrenchingly sad. The title of the book, The Orchestra of the Minorities, is the sad sound made by poultry when one chick is stolen by a kite, but equally it is the silent song and sadness of a status ridden society.

Finally Deborah Levy‘s third book on the Longlist The Man Who Saw Everything is a book which swings vertiginously between East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, a minor road accident at Abbey Road and a major road accident to the same person in the same place many years later. Saul Adler is a journalist and his ex-girlfriend in Jennifer Moreau, a photographer. The first accident is in 1988 and leads to the end of his relationship to Jennifer, the later accident leads to a hallucinatory experience in a hospital bed visited by both the living and the dead. It is hard most of the time, to know exactly which.

The Shortlist includes both Salman Rushdie’s novel and Chigozie’s. It also includes Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport – a worse waste of trees I can hardly imagine; Elif Shafak’s 10 minutes, 38 Seconds in This Strange World – a book that I loved reading, full of characters of charm and interest all encapsulated in the last minutes before the brain actually dies and Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other – welcome to twelve wonderful women living in England at different times and in different places. And finally Margaret Atwood.

Blogging the Booker 2015 – 9 Last but not least

The pile is empty, at least the pile that was the Man Booker Longlist 2015. The final stretch happened to be several short novels, at least novels that did not stretch beyond 300 pages, which is by several standards now considered short.

Anuradha Roy‘s novel Sleeping on Jupiter is a compact but unflinching look at a stolen childhood. We begin the journey on a train, in the sleeping carriage and probably air-conditioned, three elderly women are travelling on a last journey together – Latika, Vidya and Gouri. Gouri is a large, ungainly mass with a steadily more confused mind, she is unreliable and therefore something of a liability, but they are going to Jarmuli on a pilgrimage. Latika, because she wants to travel with her friends and Gouri because she is a believer, Vidya is more the mother-hen, placing cards with their address and contact details in Gouri’s handbag in case she gets lost. In the carriage with them is a young woman – she is chasing her lost childhood. She grew up in Jarmuli, in an ashram as an orphan, kept in unwitting captivity, abused and badly treated by all but the gardener, Jadhu and her friend Piku. Nomi is there scoping for a documentary, while at the same time looking for her past, but as the train stops in a station somewhere, she leaps off and goes to get food, not for herself but for a poor beggar woman, and the train moves off…

We follow these four disparate people for five days having different adventures and mishaps – odd meetings, some deliberate and some accidental, and missed opportunities. Ultimately, we learn more of their secrets, pains and mistakes. It ends quite suddenly, and then some time later we meet Nomi again, burying what remains of her past, shedding the pain and forgiving herself for what was a child-survivor’s instinct, to save herself and abandon her friend.

The prose is pitch-perfect, and some of the scenes are vividly told. The sense of place and of how sound brings up old feelings and memories is profoundly present. In the acknowledgements, Anuradha Roy writes

There are countless horrific cases of child abuse and sexual violence in India. I have drawn on the legal and investigative history of many such incidents; this book is not based on any particular instance.

Although this book is not wholly about any one such case, it does remind us once again about the fragility of childhood. The abuse is nothing like as horrific as the experiences describe in A Little Life, but only quantitatively. The lasting mental and emotional effect is life-changing and appalling.

The last book in the pile, Chigozie Obioma‘s The Fishermen is also about childhood and is a debut novel. Against a background of some violence, four boys and their younger siblings live a life governed by order, discipline and rules in Akure, a town in western Nigeria. But this changes when their father, who works for the Central Bank of Nigeria, is moved away to Yola in the north and can only come home every few weeks. While he is away and their mother is working in the market, Ikenna, Boja, Obembe and Benjamin play truant from school and go fishing in the local river, the dangerous Omi-Ala. Two seminal things happen there – they are seen by a neighbour (who they know will tell their mother) and approached by a madman, Abulu, who issues a horrible and dangerous prophecy…

The whole novel is seen from a distance of years, the teller is Benjamin.  Now older and a parent himself, he looks back at the incidents that shaped his life. At the moment which became the fulcrum of all that happened afterwards and the effect it had on his mother and father and obviously, his siblings.

For a first novel, this is something of an accomplishment because the telling is quite straightforward, there is no unnecessary detail but all the same you get a very complete picture of rural Nigeria, of profoundly pagan beliefs held together with sincere Christianity. Abulu has a horrible habit of truth-foretelling, many things that he has said do seem to come about, but he is mad, dirty and fearsome at the same time. Set in an English village this story simply could not bear the weight of the things that happen in this small town, but in an African town they take on a significant and believable ghastliness.

The father has great hopes and ambitions for his family, he prospers and has contacts abroad, there is talk of getting the older boys to Canada but before that can happen, the events that shape this compelling story begin their insidious work…

Definitely a new African voice to look out for.