BookDragon Blog

Following up two unforgettable novels that earned her a MacArthur Fellows Program “Genius” Award (which comes with a no-strings-attached $500,000 “stipend” over five years!) in 2008 was surely going to be hard work.

Last year, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie debuted her first short story collection … here’s the irony: given her spectacular personal literary history, to not compare these 12 short stories to her two novels (Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun), at least for me, proved impossible. And ultimately, Adichie is much more the accomplished novelist than she is a short story writer. Still, that’s not to say that these stories are inferior in any way; some, in fact, are haunting gems.

The collection opens with one of the 12’s best, “Cell One,” about a pampered young man who steals from his own parents, whose dissolute lifestyle eventually lands him in jail, his changing development observed and narrated by his knowing younger sister. Other standouts include “A Private Experience,” in which two very different women – one a young Isbo Christian medical student, the other an older Hausa Muslim mother – climb into a shop window desperately seeking refuge during a ethnically-motivated massacre, “Ghosts,” in which an elder professor meets a colleague who he thought was long dead, and “Jumping Monkey Hill,” in which a young Nigerian woman writer participates in a writing workshop run by a renowned academic who embodies all the colonial entitlement and appropriation of the overprivileged white man.

Unlike in her novels, Adichie is no longer grounded in her native Nigeria in her short fiction. She examines and confronts stories of Nigerian locals at home, as well as Nigerians abroad, both established immigrants and recent arrivals. Most of Adichie’s peripatetic characters are women; many are overwhelmed by their dislocation: a wife and her children living in the U.S. while her husband philanders at home, a young wife via arrangement whose doctor-husband has surely misled her, a woman reunited with her husband who barely recognizes the gentle student she married, and a young woman who escapes the advances of her so-called “uncle” and eventually falls in love with a foreign stranger.

In spite of the undeniable strength of Adichie’s stories, her novels embody the greater power. With that earlier proof of assured achievement, her readers will undoubtedly anticipate more lauded work to come.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2010