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3.54 AVERAGE
3.54 AVERAGE
dark
tense
Review for Readings https://www.readings.com.au/products/25970938/an-orchestra-of-minorities
I liked [b:The Fishermen|22875103|The Fishermen|Chigozie Obioma|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451434679l/22875103._SY75_.jpg|42439392] in 2015. I like this book as well. I am, however, at a loss to comprehend how this religious tract with its absolutely inescapable christian last act can be Booker-worthy. I liked the Igbo chi-narrator, a daemon for for fans of His Dark Materials as a reference point:
But then we descend into some unpleasant monotheistic revenge porn. Like Job, the subject of the Divine Bar Bet, a man is driven to the edge of madness by his (inexplicable and unexplained) love for some woman:
And thus begins a thoroughly nasty fall into female objectification, the assertion of property rights, and a sort of ragey nastiness that I intensely disliked.
So the three stars? All for the chi, for the ancient creature both on top of Life and curiously clueless about the way we live it now. "I have seen it many times." But mostly for this utterly perfect moment:
She rattled a string of cowries and performed the ritual of authentication to ensure I was not an evil spirit pretending to be a chi:
‘What are the seven keys to the throne room of Chukwu?’ she said.
— Seven shells of a young snail, seven cowries from the Omambala river, seven feathers of a bald vulture, seven leaves from an anunuebe tree, the shell of a seven-year-old tortoise, seven lobes of kola nuts and seven white hens.
‘Welcome, spirit one,’ she said. ‘You may proceed.’ I thanked her and bowed.
But then we descend into some unpleasant monotheistic revenge porn. Like Job, the subject of the Divine Bar Bet, a man is driven to the edge of madness by his (inexplicable and unexplained) love for some woman:
Egbunu, the man of rage – he is one whom life has dealt a heavy hand. A man who, like others, had simply found a woman he loved. He’d courted her like others do, nurtured her, only to find that all he’d done had been in vain. He wakes up one day to find himself incarcerated. He has been wronged by man and history, and it is the consciousness of this wrong that births the change in him. In the moment the change begins, a great darkness enters him through the chink in his soul. For my host, it was a crawly, multi-legged darkness shaped like a rapidly procreating millipede that burrowed into his life in the first years of his incarceration.
And thus begins a thoroughly nasty fall into female objectification, the assertion of property rights, and a sort of ragey nastiness that I intensely disliked.
So the three stars? All for the chi, for the ancient creature both on top of Life and curiously clueless about the way we live it now. "I have seen it many times." But mostly for this utterly perfect moment:
Guardian spirits of mankind, have we thought about the powers that passion creates in human beings? Have we considered why a man could run through a field of fire to get to a woman he loves? Have we thought about the impact of love on the body of lovers? Have we considered the symmetry of its power? Have we considered what poetry incites in their souls, and the impress of endearments on a softened heart?
I'm not a fan of out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire tales, and this book was a long series of them.
For the most part, I liked the telling of the story from the chi's point of view, it provided a nice blend of the urgency of a first-person narrative with the objectivity of a degree of removal. Some of the imparting of wisdom felt a little forced.
For the most part, I liked the telling of the story from the chi's point of view, it provided a nice blend of the urgency of a first-person narrative with the objectivity of a degree of removal. Some of the imparting of wisdom felt a little forced.
A modern antithesis to Homer's Odyssey
Whilst at times it felt very slow and unnecessarily detailed, there are a number of incredibly powerful moments. I did find myself wanting to continue with the story less and less as the protagonist's suffering develops. In hindsight, I'm glad I pushed through to the end.
Whilst at times it felt very slow and unnecessarily detailed, there are a number of incredibly powerful moments. I did find myself wanting to continue with the story less and less as the protagonist's suffering develops. In hindsight, I'm glad I pushed through to the end.
A tragic retelling of the Odyssey set in modern day Nigeria.
Sacrifices we make for love, is what sums up An Orchestra of Minorities; Chigozie Obioma retelling of Homer’s Odyssey. Obioma’s modern myth is made authentic by blending in African folklore, fables and proverbs and articulating a range of poetic voices. Told through Chinonso’s ‘chi, this guardian Illuminates Igbo mythology, enchants us with detours to various realms, and gives us with a gripping account of its host’s travels. I really enjoyed the ride Obioma puts the reader one.
‘My father told me. He was always saying it is like a burial song for the one that has gone. He called it Egwu umu-obereihe. You understand? I don’t know umu-obere-ihe in English.’
‘Little things,’ she said. ‘No, minorities.’
‘Yes, yes, that is so. That is the translation my father said. That’s how he said it in English: minorities. He was always saying it is like their “okestra”.
Chigozie Obioma's The Fisherman was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker, rather to my surprise. I commented that it was:
In a general way, we may visualize a person’s chi as his other identity in spiritland – his spirit being complementing his terrestrial human being; for nothing can stand alone, there must always be another thing standing beside it. —Chinua Achebe, ‘Chi in Igbo Cosmology’
The novel opens with the narrator, a chi, trying to preemptively excuse his host's Chinonso Solomon Olisa apparent crime in harming a woman:
Ala forbids that a person should harm a pregnant woman, whether man or beast— For the earth belongs to her, the great mother of mankind, the greatest among all creatures, second only to you, whose gender or kind no man or spirit knows— I have come because I fear that she will raise her hand against my host, who is known in this cycle of life as Chinonso Solomon Olisa— This is why I have hastened here to testify of all I have witnessed and to persuade you and the great goddess that if what I fear has happened is true, to let it be understood that he has committed this great crime in error, unknowingly— Although I will relate most things in my own words, they will be true because he and I are one. His voice is my voice. To speak of his words as if he were distinct from me is to render my own words as if they were spoken by another.
The chi then narrates the tragic story - in considerable detail - that led to this point, and the reader soon realises that his intention is more to justify his actions than his host's. The use of the chi device is fascinating as it allows the author to, uniquely, blend a first and second person perspective - this is certainly not a traditional privileged third person narrator:
EGBUNU, I have spoken about the primal weakness of man and his chi: their inability to see the future. Should they have possessed this ability, a great many disasters would have been easily prevented! Many, many. But I know that you require me to testify in the sequence that things happened, to give a full account of my host’s actions, and thus I must not stray from the path of my story.
As with the author's debut, there is a lot of explicit commentary on the difference in the traditional Igbo versus Western world view. For example, that of time:
EGBUNU, one of the most striking differences between the way of the great fathers and their children is that the latter have adopted the White Man’s idea about time. The White Man reckoned long ago that time is divine – an entity to whose will man must submit. Following a prescribed tick, one will arrive at a particular place, certain that an event will begin at that set time. They seem to say, ‘Brethren, an arm of divinity is amongst us, and it has set its purpose at twelve forty, so we must submit to its dictates.’ If something happens, the White Man obliges himself to ascribe it to time – ‘On this day, July twentieth, 1985, such-and-such happened.’
Whereas time to the august fathers was something that was both spiritual and human. It was in part beyond their control and was ordered by the same force that brought the universe into existence. When they wanted to discern the beginning of a season or parse the age of a day or measure the length of years, they looked to nature.
But also, the wise fathers believed that there is a part of time that man can control, a means by which man can subject time to his own will. To them, time is not divine; it is an element, like air, that can be put to use. They can use air to put out fires, blow insects out of people’s eyes, or even cause flutes to produce music. This is the same way that time can be subject to the will of man – when a group among the fathers says, for instance, ‘We, the elders of Amaokpu, have a meeting at sunset.’ That time is expansive. It could be the beginning of sunset, or its middle, or its end. But even this does not matter. What matters is that they know the number of those coming to the meeting. Those who arrive ahead of others wait, talk, laugh until everyone is there, and that’s when the meeting begins
Although, again as with the author's debut, this is sometimes over-laboured - later references to dates are typically in the style the year the White Man calls 1963. Similarly while the use of untranslated igbo in the text is effective, the occasional attachment of in the language of the White Man to English text is rather less necessary.
The chi has also been attached to many hosts over many generations, and one of the novel's more effective and striking devices is the way that, using the chi's past experience, the author is able to bring out aspects of Nigerian history, from the 15th century arrival of the Portuguese, the slave trade, colonial rule, the formation of Nigerian as a nation and the Biafran / Nigerian civil war.
The chi's narration typically draws on both traditional wisdom and sayings, but also comparisons from previous history, marked with I have seen it many times, a phrase used very effectively 46 times in the novel.
Plot-wise, the detour into Cyprus, was both the pivotal part of the novel, but also to me the weakest, overly drawing on a specific incident in the author's own experience. However, as the host finds himself facing criminal trial, the chi visits the spirit world, leading to one of the novel's most striking sections, and perhaps the basis of the Paradise lost comparison. For example, as he seeks entry:
She rattled a string of cowries and performed the ritual of authentication to ensure I was not an evil spirit pretending to be a chi:
‘What are the seven keys to the throne room of Chukwu?’ she said.
— Seven shells of a young snail, seven cowries from the Omambala river, seven feathers of a bald vulture, seven leaves from an anunuebe tree, the shell of a seven-year-old tortoise, seven lobes of kola nuts and seven white hens.
‘Welcome, spirit one,’ she said. ‘You may proceed.’ I thanked her and bowed.
And in the novel's last third it becomes a powerful discussion of forgiveness and repentance, with an explicitly Christian flavour, but also of the drive for revenge:
For the spirit of a man may long endure pitiless circumstances, but eventually it will stand erect, unable to take any more. I have seen it many times. In place of submission, rebellion will erect itself. And in the place of endurance, resistance. He will rise with the vengeance of a black lion and execute his cause with a clenched fist. And what he will do, what he will not do, even he will not expect. Egbunu, the man of rage – he is one whom life has dealt a heavy hand. A man who, like others, had simply found a woman he loved. He’d courted her like others do, nurtured her, only to find that all he’d done had been in vain. He wakes up one day to find himself incarcerated. He has been wronged by man and history, and it is the consciousness of this wrong that births the change in him. In the moment the change begins, a great darkness enters him through the chink in his soul. For my host, it was a crawly, multi-legged darkness shaped like a rapidly procreating millipede that burrowed into his life in the first years of his incarceration.
Perhaps the most important aspect of this novel is that like two other striking recent novels, Ocean Vuong's [b:On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous|41880609|On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous|Ocean Vuong|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1552172553l/41880609._SX50_.jpg|61665003] and [b:Freshwater|35412372|Freshwater|Akwaeke Emezi|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500884500l/35412372._SY75_.jpg|56785192] by Akwaeke Emezi, it reminds us that the Western perspective on both the spiritual world, but also the nature of storytelling, is far from universal. I had expected at least one of those on the Booker longlist, but An Orchestra of Minorities is the most accomplished of the 3 books, and a worthy inclusion. A shortlist contender - 3.75 stars.
‘Little things,’ she said. ‘No, minorities.’
‘Yes, yes, that is so. That is the translation my father said. That’s how he said it in English: minorities. He was always saying it is like their “okestra”.
Chigozie Obioma's The Fisherman was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker, rather to my surprise. I commented that it was:
a promising debut and I will follow the author's career with interest, but too flawed to be Booker shortlist worthy - one for the Costa first novel award instead.His 2nd novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, builds on his debut, a more accomplished work, although sharing many of the same strengths and weaknesses. Here his explicit aim is, following again in Achebe's footsteps, but this time his Igbo Trilogy and his essay on the topic of 'chi', to attempt a sort of Paradise Lose for Igbo cosmology (see e.g. https://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/being-and-existence-an-interview-with-chigozie-obioma/)
An attempt at updating Chinua Achebe's magnificent Things Fall Apart ... one can see what the author is trying to do: inject the traditions of oral storytelling into the conventional novel [...but] he seems to try a bit too hard for local flavour [...and] the end story, when the laboured metaphors and local colour are stripped away, is just too simple and not particularly compelling.
In a general way, we may visualize a person’s chi as his other identity in spiritland – his spirit being complementing his terrestrial human being; for nothing can stand alone, there must always be another thing standing beside it. —Chinua Achebe, ‘Chi in Igbo Cosmology’
The novel opens with the narrator, a chi, trying to preemptively excuse his host's Chinonso Solomon Olisa apparent crime in harming a woman:
Ala forbids that a person should harm a pregnant woman, whether man or beast— For the earth belongs to her, the great mother of mankind, the greatest among all creatures, second only to you, whose gender or kind no man or spirit knows— I have come because I fear that she will raise her hand against my host, who is known in this cycle of life as Chinonso Solomon Olisa— This is why I have hastened here to testify of all I have witnessed and to persuade you and the great goddess that if what I fear has happened is true, to let it be understood that he has committed this great crime in error, unknowingly— Although I will relate most things in my own words, they will be true because he and I are one. His voice is my voice. To speak of his words as if he were distinct from me is to render my own words as if they were spoken by another.
The chi then narrates the tragic story - in considerable detail - that led to this point, and the reader soon realises that his intention is more to justify his actions than his host's. The use of the chi device is fascinating as it allows the author to, uniquely, blend a first and second person perspective - this is certainly not a traditional privileged third person narrator:
EGBUNU, I have spoken about the primal weakness of man and his chi: their inability to see the future. Should they have possessed this ability, a great many disasters would have been easily prevented! Many, many. But I know that you require me to testify in the sequence that things happened, to give a full account of my host’s actions, and thus I must not stray from the path of my story.
As with the author's debut, there is a lot of explicit commentary on the difference in the traditional Igbo versus Western world view. For example, that of time:
EGBUNU, one of the most striking differences between the way of the great fathers and their children is that the latter have adopted the White Man’s idea about time. The White Man reckoned long ago that time is divine – an entity to whose will man must submit. Following a prescribed tick, one will arrive at a particular place, certain that an event will begin at that set time. They seem to say, ‘Brethren, an arm of divinity is amongst us, and it has set its purpose at twelve forty, so we must submit to its dictates.’ If something happens, the White Man obliges himself to ascribe it to time – ‘On this day, July twentieth, 1985, such-and-such happened.’
Whereas time to the august fathers was something that was both spiritual and human. It was in part beyond their control and was ordered by the same force that brought the universe into existence. When they wanted to discern the beginning of a season or parse the age of a day or measure the length of years, they looked to nature.
But also, the wise fathers believed that there is a part of time that man can control, a means by which man can subject time to his own will. To them, time is not divine; it is an element, like air, that can be put to use. They can use air to put out fires, blow insects out of people’s eyes, or even cause flutes to produce music. This is the same way that time can be subject to the will of man – when a group among the fathers says, for instance, ‘We, the elders of Amaokpu, have a meeting at sunset.’ That time is expansive. It could be the beginning of sunset, or its middle, or its end. But even this does not matter. What matters is that they know the number of those coming to the meeting. Those who arrive ahead of others wait, talk, laugh until everyone is there, and that’s when the meeting begins
Although, again as with the author's debut, this is sometimes over-laboured - later references to dates are typically in the style the year the White Man calls 1963. Similarly while the use of untranslated igbo in the text is effective, the occasional attachment of in the language of the White Man to English text is rather less necessary.
The chi has also been attached to many hosts over many generations, and one of the novel's more effective and striking devices is the way that, using the chi's past experience, the author is able to bring out aspects of Nigerian history, from the 15th century arrival of the Portuguese, the slave trade, colonial rule, the formation of Nigerian as a nation and the Biafran / Nigerian civil war.
The chi's narration typically draws on both traditional wisdom and sayings, but also comparisons from previous history, marked with I have seen it many times, a phrase used very effectively 46 times in the novel.
Plot-wise, the detour into Cyprus, was both the pivotal part of the novel, but also to me the weakest, overly drawing on a specific incident in the author's own experience. However, as the host finds himself facing criminal trial, the chi visits the spirit world, leading to one of the novel's most striking sections, and perhaps the basis of the Paradise lost comparison. For example, as he seeks entry:
She rattled a string of cowries and performed the ritual of authentication to ensure I was not an evil spirit pretending to be a chi:
‘What are the seven keys to the throne room of Chukwu?’ she said.
— Seven shells of a young snail, seven cowries from the Omambala river, seven feathers of a bald vulture, seven leaves from an anunuebe tree, the shell of a seven-year-old tortoise, seven lobes of kola nuts and seven white hens.
‘Welcome, spirit one,’ she said. ‘You may proceed.’ I thanked her and bowed.
And in the novel's last third it becomes a powerful discussion of forgiveness and repentance, with an explicitly Christian flavour, but also of the drive for revenge:
For the spirit of a man may long endure pitiless circumstances, but eventually it will stand erect, unable to take any more. I have seen it many times. In place of submission, rebellion will erect itself. And in the place of endurance, resistance. He will rise with the vengeance of a black lion and execute his cause with a clenched fist. And what he will do, what he will not do, even he will not expect. Egbunu, the man of rage – he is one whom life has dealt a heavy hand. A man who, like others, had simply found a woman he loved. He’d courted her like others do, nurtured her, only to find that all he’d done had been in vain. He wakes up one day to find himself incarcerated. He has been wronged by man and history, and it is the consciousness of this wrong that births the change in him. In the moment the change begins, a great darkness enters him through the chink in his soul. For my host, it was a crawly, multi-legged darkness shaped like a rapidly procreating millipede that burrowed into his life in the first years of his incarceration.
Perhaps the most important aspect of this novel is that like two other striking recent novels, Ocean Vuong's [b:On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous|41880609|On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous|Ocean Vuong|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1552172553l/41880609._SX50_.jpg|61665003] and [b:Freshwater|35412372|Freshwater|Akwaeke Emezi|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500884500l/35412372._SY75_.jpg|56785192] by Akwaeke Emezi, it reminds us that the Western perspective on both the spiritual world, but also the nature of storytelling, is far from universal. I had expected at least one of those on the Booker longlist, but An Orchestra of Minorities is the most accomplished of the 3 books, and a worthy inclusion. A shortlist contender - 3.75 stars.
The only one on last year's Booker shortlist I didn't read. He makes a lot of reference to the Odyssey, but actually his supernatural sections have more in common with the Aeneid. That said, it's just OK, it doesn't seem to be the masterpiece that some claim.