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withlivjones's review against another edition
dark
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
Chinonso was really going through it huh
Content Warnings
Graphic: Fire/Fire injury, Animal death, Rape, Stalking, Racism, Classism, Sexual assault, Suicide attempt, and Violence
Moderate: Death of parent, Domestic abuse, and Death
daja57's review against another edition
4.0
A carefully crafted novel with an ingenious narrative technique and some delightful insights into the human condition. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2019.
This story is narrated by the chi - a sort of cross between a guardian angel and a soul - of the protagonist. This is a useful conceit for two reasons. Firstly, because the chi has been reincarnated through a number of lives and so knows more about the behaviours of humanity than its host, enabling the narration to comment sagely from a position of detachment on what is happening. Secondly, because the chi can, from time to time, leave the host’s body and therefore know more about the situation than the protagonist. For both these reasons, the principally first person narration achieves a degree of omniscience. (This is tempered somewhat when the chi explains that what the host cannot say, he cannot say, a rule he has already repeatedly broken, which seems to be the narrator's attempt to have the best of both worlds.)
A third reason emerged just over half way through the book when a killing occurs. The chi then spends a whole chapter popping up to heaven to discuss things with God. Someone (I think it might have been E M Forster) once said that when you reach a climax in your story, when you have got your reader hanging on every word, desperate to know what happens next, have your character look out of the window just to prolong the suspense. Having a chi as narrator enables this to happen.
As if to compensate for this supernatural element, the story is narrated in a very pedestrian style in which things happen one after another with little embellishment. This includes calling a spade a spade: for example, the protagonist urinates, he copulates. This is a style I associate with other African books such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and its sequels No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God. I also thought of Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This everyday style is interrupted whenever the chi communes with his spirit colleagues, when the prose becomes much more flowery, and when the chi quotes proverbs and sayings, which can be quite picturesque (see selected quotes).
But it also reminded me of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison, which grounds a fantastic tale with meticulous observations of everyday life, and Glister by John Burnside which combines mystery with gritty reality.
Is this sort of style the best technique to achieve verisimilitude when you are asking readers to accept fantastical storylines, such as in novels using magic realism, or ones far from their experience of everyday, such as novels set in a war zone or a prison camp?
Surprisingly, given this prosaic style, I found myself on an emotional roller-coaster, at least in the first part of the story. The protagonist falls in love with a woman of much higher status than himself; when he meets her family he is humiliated by them. I empathised deeply. He decides that the family will never let him marry her unless he improves himself and so, because he loves her deeply, he sells his home and his business so he can travel abroad for an education.
But then, about 40% of the way through the book, the story seemed to morph into a recreation of the 'hero's journey'. The long first section had established the status quo ante; despite a prophecy of doom, the hero determines on a quest (to improve his lowly status so that he can get the girl, a girl for whom, very early on, he has made an animal sacrifice). Then, in a chapter actually entitled "Crossing the threshold", he travels to a liminal realm (Northern Cyprus, a quasi state recognised by almost no other nation) where he meets challenges, guides and helpers (eg Tobe) not all of whom are friendly. He undergoes (another chapter heading) a "metamorphosis" while enduring a time of trial at the end of which, despite having nothing left, he makes a gift of the little that he does have (glossed with a Biblical reference about going two miles with someone who asks you to go one mile with them). At his lowest point he has a near death experience. Rather unexpectedly reborn he returns (in a chapter headed "Return") to his own world a sadder but wiser man and (again unexpectedly) receives at least a partial restitution for his suffering. However, unlike the happy ever after endings of a fairy tale, this story has a tragic twist in its tail (this is not a spoiler, given that the narrative is cast as the hero's chi, pleading for forgiveness for his host, who has killed, or might have killed, a pregnant woman).
I rather lost my motivation during the Cyprus interlude. It seemed to drag. I found it more difficult to empathise with a character who no longer possessed agency but seemed little more than an object to which things happened. I was no longer 'involved' in the story. And I became increasingly irritated by the supernatural bits, especially the affectation of introducing chapters and even some paragraphs with one of the names of the deity.
I was also confused about whether one is supposed to sympathise with the protagonist or not. We know, throughout, that the chi is pleading mitigating circumstances for a bad deed done by the protagonist. That suggests that the author wants the reader to be on the protagonist's side. But is he a goodie or a baddie? He is described as "a shepherd of birds" (Ch 5) and shepherds are conventionally seen as good people (like Jesus) but shepherds exploit their flock, taking their produce and killing the creatures for whom they have cared; shepherds are predators. The title of the book refers to the collective distress of his flock of birds mourning when one of the chicks is snatched by a hawk. Given that the hero is portrayed as a poor man, helpless against the bullying of the rich, especially when he travels to Cyprus, I supposed that the title of the book is a metaphor for all the poor people of the world, so many from the African continent, who are preyed upon by the rich people in the world.
Perhaps he is making the point that those who have power, no matter how much or how little, prey upon those who have less power. That is the theme of my novel The Kids of God.
A recurrent motif is the story of the gosling whom the protagonist loved as a child, after his father had killed the gosling's mother for sport. But the gosling was tethered and, eventually, in a foreshadowing of the plot, killed by the protagonist. "For each man kills the thing he loves," as Oscar Wilde wrote. In may ways the fatal flaw of this hero was that, like a dog in the manger, he couldn't bear to see someone else getting enjoyment from one whom he loved.
I suppose that might be the point. The author is inviting us to appreciate the protagonist with all his faults. As the French say: “Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner”; to understand all is to forgive all. We are sitting in judgement upon this man who has done something awful, upon this man who is a representative of the poor people of the world, the dispossessed, upon this Everyman, upon this shepherd, upon this man who in some ways represents Jesus himself, and we are asked to understand his strengths and weaknesses and to weigh him in the balance and to decide whether to forgive him.
Delightfully, the book is written in a mixture of English, Igbo and Pidgin. Frustratingly, the Igbo and Pidgin are rarely translated. Annoyingly, sometimes Igbo is used at a key moment in the text. Is this book supposed to be inaccessible to non-Igbo speakers? Is the reader supposed to use Google Translate to find out what is going on? If ever there was a case for footnotes, this is it.
This story is narrated by the chi - a sort of cross between a guardian angel and a soul - of the protagonist. This is a useful conceit for two reasons. Firstly, because the chi has been reincarnated through a number of lives and so knows more about the behaviours of humanity than its host, enabling the narration to comment sagely from a position of detachment on what is happening. Secondly, because the chi can, from time to time, leave the host’s body and therefore know more about the situation than the protagonist. For both these reasons, the principally first person narration achieves a degree of omniscience. (This is tempered somewhat when the chi explains that what the host cannot say, he cannot say, a rule he has already repeatedly broken, which seems to be the narrator's attempt to have the best of both worlds.)
A third reason emerged just over half way through the book when a killing occurs. The chi then spends a whole chapter popping up to heaven to discuss things with God. Someone (I think it might have been E M Forster) once said that when you reach a climax in your story, when you have got your reader hanging on every word, desperate to know what happens next, have your character look out of the window just to prolong the suspense. Having a chi as narrator enables this to happen.
As if to compensate for this supernatural element, the story is narrated in a very pedestrian style in which things happen one after another with little embellishment. This includes calling a spade a spade: for example, the protagonist urinates, he copulates. This is a style I associate with other African books such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and its sequels No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God. I also thought of Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This everyday style is interrupted whenever the chi communes with his spirit colleagues, when the prose becomes much more flowery, and when the chi quotes proverbs and sayings, which can be quite picturesque (see selected quotes).
But it also reminded me of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison, which grounds a fantastic tale with meticulous observations of everyday life, and Glister by John Burnside which combines mystery with gritty reality.
Is this sort of style the best technique to achieve verisimilitude when you are asking readers to accept fantastical storylines, such as in novels using magic realism, or ones far from their experience of everyday, such as novels set in a war zone or a prison camp?
Surprisingly, given this prosaic style, I found myself on an emotional roller-coaster, at least in the first part of the story. The protagonist falls in love with a woman of much higher status than himself; when he meets her family he is humiliated by them. I empathised deeply. He decides that the family will never let him marry her unless he improves himself and so, because he loves her deeply, he sells his home and his business so he can travel abroad for an education.
But then, about 40% of the way through the book, the story seemed to morph into a recreation of the 'hero's journey'. The long first section had established the status quo ante; despite a prophecy of doom, the hero determines on a quest (to improve his lowly status so that he can get the girl, a girl for whom, very early on, he has made an animal sacrifice). Then, in a chapter actually entitled "Crossing the threshold", he travels to a liminal realm (Northern Cyprus, a quasi state recognised by almost no other nation) where he meets challenges, guides and helpers (eg Tobe) not all of whom are friendly. He undergoes (another chapter heading) a "metamorphosis" while enduring a time of trial at the end of which, despite having nothing left, he makes a gift of the little that he does have (glossed with a Biblical reference about going two miles with someone who asks you to go one mile with them). At his lowest point he has a near death experience. Rather unexpectedly reborn he returns (in a chapter headed "Return") to his own world a sadder but wiser man and (again unexpectedly) receives at least a partial restitution for his suffering. However, unlike the happy ever after endings of a fairy tale, this story has a tragic twist in its tail (this is not a spoiler, given that the narrative is cast as the hero's chi, pleading for forgiveness for his host, who has killed, or might have killed, a pregnant woman).
I rather lost my motivation during the Cyprus interlude. It seemed to drag. I found it more difficult to empathise with a character who no longer possessed agency but seemed little more than an object to which things happened. I was no longer 'involved' in the story. And I became increasingly irritated by the supernatural bits, especially the affectation of introducing chapters and even some paragraphs with one of the names of the deity.
I was also confused about whether one is supposed to sympathise with the protagonist or not. We know, throughout, that the chi is pleading mitigating circumstances for a bad deed done by the protagonist. That suggests that the author wants the reader to be on the protagonist's side. But is he a goodie or a baddie? He is described as "a shepherd of birds" (Ch 5) and shepherds are conventionally seen as good people (like Jesus) but shepherds exploit their flock, taking their produce and killing the creatures for whom they have cared; shepherds are predators. The title of the book refers to the collective distress of his flock of birds mourning when one of the chicks is snatched by a hawk. Given that the hero is portrayed as a poor man, helpless against the bullying of the rich, especially when he travels to Cyprus, I supposed that the title of the book is a metaphor for all the poor people of the world, so many from the African continent, who are preyed upon by the rich people in the world.
Perhaps he is making the point that those who have power, no matter how much or how little, prey upon those who have less power. That is the theme of my novel The Kids of God.
A recurrent motif is the story of the gosling whom the protagonist loved as a child, after his father had killed the gosling's mother for sport. But the gosling was tethered and, eventually, in a foreshadowing of the plot, killed by the protagonist. "For each man kills the thing he loves," as Oscar Wilde wrote. In may ways the fatal flaw of this hero was that, like a dog in the manger, he couldn't bear to see someone else getting enjoyment from one whom he loved.
I suppose that might be the point. The author is inviting us to appreciate the protagonist with all his faults. As the French say: “Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner”; to understand all is to forgive all. We are sitting in judgement upon this man who has done something awful, upon this man who is a representative of the poor people of the world, the dispossessed, upon this Everyman, upon this shepherd, upon this man who in some ways represents Jesus himself, and we are asked to understand his strengths and weaknesses and to weigh him in the balance and to decide whether to forgive him.
Delightfully, the book is written in a mixture of English, Igbo and Pidgin. Frustratingly, the Igbo and Pidgin are rarely translated. Annoyingly, sometimes Igbo is used at a key moment in the text. Is this book supposed to be inaccessible to non-Igbo speakers? Is the reader supposed to use Google Translate to find out what is going on? If ever there was a case for footnotes, this is it.
sidharthvardhan's review against another edition
3.0
It really had an idea of great potential with the concept of narration by Chi - the guardian angel which accompanies all humans according to Igbo mythology. The relation between a Chi and his host could have been really strong - like that of ego and superego, or conscious and unconscious, etc or even romantic notion that a person is never really alone. Instead, we have nothing so subtle here. The relation seemed to built at random. Chi ironically could be eliminated from the story without affecting the events of his host at all because he never really manages to 'guard' him into better sense.
Igbo Mythology described in the book though with artistic liberty still formed most of what was best in the book.
The story itself is a love story and not a particularly strong one at that. And Obioma seems to have a bad habit of inserting unnecessary details and explanations which seem to slow the book down and won't let the tension build. Igbo culture has people using proverbs a lot when trying to be eloquent, but there were so many instances when metaphorical examples given by Chi to talk about emotion seemed too obscure and unnecessary. There are little things that Chi says which his listener probably would already have known and so detailing them was neither realist nor good to aesthetic of the book. The book could have been cut into half and would have been better for it.
Even the ending though delayed by at least a couple of unnecessary chapters seemed to me inadequate - especially given the fact that story is being narrated as a defense by a Chi and such a defense probably won't end in mid-scene.
Igbo Mythology described in the book though with artistic liberty still formed most of what was best in the book.
The story itself is a love story and not a particularly strong one at that. And Obioma seems to have a bad habit of inserting unnecessary details and explanations which seem to slow the book down and won't let the tension build. Igbo culture has people using proverbs a lot when trying to be eloquent, but there were so many instances when metaphorical examples given by Chi to talk about emotion seemed too obscure and unnecessary. There are little things that Chi says which his listener probably would already have known and so detailing them was neither realist nor good to aesthetic of the book. The book could have been cut into half and would have been better for it.
Even the ending though delayed by at least a couple of unnecessary chapters seemed to me inadequate - especially given the fact that story is being narrated as a defense by a Chi and such a defense probably won't end in mid-scene.
chriswright39's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
readingafrica's review against another edition
3.0
good narrative, but a little too sad for me, and the voice of the chi was repetitive.
neliaekeji's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
getinkshedtears's review against another edition
3.0
I have mixed feelings about this book. As an exploration of Igbo cosmology, it gets 5 stars: I learned more new terms and concepts from it than anything I've read for a long time. As a narrative, I hated it and had to basically flog myself into finishing. I enjoyed The Fishermen and was hoping for more out of this one. Obioma would be well-served by a new editor.
jcgrenn_reads's review against another edition
4.0
I’m about 25 percent embarrassed to say that every few pages of this book I kept thinking “oh my word. Good book, I think, but this is taking FOREVER.” Kevin from the office with his “why say lot word when few word do trick” would be completely stunned by this lengthy, chunky, thoughtful book that sometimes seems enamored by its own thoughts and spirals and rabbit trails. Why can’t I get any closer to the back cover??!! How many pages are in this again??
Then it hit me. What is time to an eternal spirit giving testimony on behalf of his human host. What is 450 pages and a few months of setting down a book and picking it back up to struggle through another beautiful chapter, even if it feels like the right handed chunk of pages left keeps going and going and going, compared to a spirit testifying to a creator on behalf of his human. The reflections on humanity noticed by the chi (and by the author) are of a depth you will be hardpressed to dig up anywhere else than in Obioma’s writing.
Read this book. Take your time. Set it down and come back if you need to. Read another in the middle. Read a few, but then come back to this one. It’s worth it.
rosibook's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5