Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an award-winning Nigerian author who writes about her homeland and how its people are conflicted between their own unique African identities and the onrushing tide of Westernisation.

 Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus was set in a time when Nigeria was ruled by an army dictatorship; her second, Half of a Yellow Sun, covers the civil war at the end of the 1960s when the state of Biafra attempted to form a separate country for the Igbo people. Americanah moves to more recent times when teachers and lecturers are on strike, causing many students to leave Nigeria to seek higher education in the USA or UK. Adichie is a very talented writer and I would strongly recommend all three.

In Americanah we follow the lives of Ifemelu and Obinze from the friendship of their school days through to a growing affection and a deepening relationship in their teens. They have become soulmates but are now forced apart when Ifemelu leaves Nigeria for the USA to continue her stalled education. She expects Obinze to follow her, but he is unable to do so and ends up in the UK. Unable to pay her rent and unable to get a job Ifemelu cuts herself off from all contact with Obinze, not replying to his many letters and emails.

Here are two intelligent, aspirational, young Nigerians seeking an education worthy of their talents but now seen as strangers and aliens, having to fight to achieve status and recognition against immigration barriers and endemic racism. Their ambitions are frustrated at every turn and Obinze is forced back to Nigeria.

Adiche studied in the USA and cleverly throws a strong light on racist issues by means of Ifemelu starting a blog called "Raceteenth". Some blog posts are interspersed with the text of the novel and take the reader out its fictional world into the harsh reality of the real thing.

One particularly moving episode in Americanah is the election of Obama as the first black president of the USA

Blaine was crying holding Araminta who was crying then holding Ifemelu squeezing her too tight and Pee was hugging Michael and Grace was hugging Nathan and Paula hugging Araminta and Ifemelu was hugging Grace, and the living room became an altar of disbelieving joy.

Her phone bleeped with a text from Dike, “I can't believe it. My president is black like me.” She read the text few times her eyes filling with tears.

On television, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama and their two daughters were walking onto a stage. They were carried by the wind, bathed in incandescent light, victorious and smiling. 

“Young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled, Americans have sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of red States and blue, states. We have been and always will be the United States of America”

Remember those heady days when the world seemed to turn a corner of tolerance and hope? Read this and weep.

Although this novel is rich in many things, the central core is a love story. Can young love survive change and maturity, the separation of distance and time, and the emotional turmoil of other relationships?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has given a TED talk on "The Danger of a Single Story" and this beautifully written novel challenges the reader to open his/her mind to the multitude of stories of other people and other nations so we may better understand our common humanity.

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All Quite On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

“1917” is a current must see film. I’m told it is not to be missed, but I won’t be going. No matter how good, it cannot better the film I saw inside my head last month when I read “All Quite on The Western Front”

"Continuous fire, defensive fire, curtain fire, trench mortars, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words but they embrace all the horrors of the world"

Your name is Paul Bäume. You are a young German student, looking forward to completing your education, meeting pretty girls, having fun and making your mark in the world. But suddenly that world has vanished. You are in the army, lying in mud at the bottom of a shell hole and WWI is raging around you. You could die at any moment.

"We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing from ourselves, from our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces."

The suffering and terror of war make no sense to Paul and his friends. He has no quarrel with young Frenchmen or Englishmen. No desire to kill them. Yet, in desperation for his own life he does kill a French soldier in hand-to-hand combat. As he lies exhausted at the bottom of a shell hole full of remorse, he watches the man slowly die. He examines the man's papers; he sees he was a printer; he sees the photographs of a wife and children. In his shame, he makes a promise to the dead man that should he survive he will fight against the things that have wrecked both their lives. Such killing must never happen again.

The utter waste of war pervades the whole book. No more so than in a hospital where Paul is recovering from a leg wound. He is lucky, he will live and walk again but around him men are dying from all manner of terrible wounds on every part of their bodies.

"How pointless all human thoughts, words and deeds must be, if things like this are possible! Everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilisation weren't even able to prevent this river of blood............Only a military hospital can show you what war is."

All Quite on The Western Front is a wonderful novel, immersing the reader in the lives of a small group of young men as day after day they face the unimaginable horror of trench warfare; only able to endure through comradeship, ingenuity, humour and courage.

"Summer, 1918. Never has life in its simplest outline seemed so desirable to us as it does now; the poppies in the fields near our base camp, the shiny beetles on the blades of grass, the warm evenings in the cool, half dark rooms, black, mysterious trees at twilight, the stars and the streams, dreams and a long sleep. Oh life, life, life!"

Do read it, especially if you’ve been to see “1917”. Which is the better film do you think?

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The month of June:13 1⁄2 By Sharon Olds

As my daughter approaches graduation 

and puberty at the same time, 

At her own calm deliberate serious rate,
She begins to kick up her heels, 

jazz out her hands, thrust out her hip bones, 

chant I'm great! I'm great! 

She feels 8th grade coming open around her, 

a chrysalis cracking and letting her out,

it falls behind her and joins the other husks on the ground,
7th grade, 6th grade, 

the purple rind of 5th grade, 

the hard jacket of 4th when she had so much pain,

3rd grade, 2nd, 

The dim cocoon of 1st grade 

back there somewhere on the path, 

and kindergarten like a strip of thumb-suck blanket 

taken from the actual blanket they wrapped her in at birth.
The whole school is coming off her shoulders 

like a cloak unclasped, 

and she dances forth in her jerky sexy child’s 

joke dance of self, self, 

her throat tight and a hard new song coming out of it, 

while her two dark eyes shine above her body 

like a good mother and a good father 

who looked down and love everything their baby does, 

the way she lives their love.

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Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan

I bought this book on the strength of watching Christmas University Challenge. Lucy Magan was captain of the Trinity Hall team and was introduced as a writer for the Guardian and Stylist magazine and as the author of Bookworm. This sounded to be my kind of book so I ordered it and read it over just 3 days.

Lucy Mangan is a very witty writer and the book just carries you along, as annecdote follows annecdote from her reading life, often including her Father (a reader & thinker), her Mother (a doer and talker) and her younger sister (child lego fanatic and computer nerd). Here's a sample:

A few years ago I mentioned to my sister that I was planning to visit Penhurst Place in Kent for the first time. ‘Oh yes’, she said. ‘Dad and I went there once when I was little’.

‘Without me?’ I said, ever alert to potential acts of favouritism and not about to let an intervening three decades dampen my outrage.

‘Yes, of course’, she said, looking baffled. ‘We used to go every weekend.'

‘Penhurst Place?’ I said, equally baffled in my turn.

My sister is not known for love of either Philip Sidney , Renaissance poetry or Elizabethan architecture. She likes computers, dogs and Mythbusters on Discovery Channel.

‘No, turd,’ she said - she has never shown me the full measure respect I feel is due to elder sisters – ‘different places on the Magan Magical Mystery tour’.

It transpired that she and Dad used to set off in the car every Saturday and take it in turns to choose whether to go left or right at each junction and see where they ended up.

‘And where was I?’ I asked.

‘Where do you think you were?’ She said. ‘You were at home. Reading. We told you we were going every time and you never broke eye contact with your stupid books. Sometimes you'd wave goodbye as you turned a page.’

During the course of this highly entertaining memoir Lucy Mangan ranges over 250 books from nursery pre-reading days when her Dad would buy books and read them to her, through to her own voracious reading of primary and secondary school. There is a cornucopia of information about the books, their authors and illustrators, so Bookworm is also a potted history of writing for children from earliest days to the near present. She tells how different books affected her and of her likes and dislikes. 

She says "I had a strict and enduring rule against books in which animals - especially talking animals - were a predominant feature" and then goes on to say how this caused her to miss out on Peter Rabbit, The Wind in The Willows, Tarka The Otter and other animal-centric stories. Eventually she realises this is simply a mindless predjudice and comments, "What. An. Idiot."

She is obviously a bookworm at the top end of the scale, bordering on insanity and seems to have copies of almost all the books she has ever read with over 10,000 in her house. Though when a book dealer came to view them she says, "He came. He saw. He left."  There were no pristine collectors' items but simply well-worn readers' copies. She had, he said, what looked like a jumble sale hoisted on the walls.

As an adult reader she still needs her daily reading "fix" but now does not get absorbed as easily or as fully. Daily life and her critical faculties are more in play and it needs a powerful page to be able to banish them from her mind. Something that all life-long bookworms can relate to - I certainly do.

My early reading was the 50's and 60's so there is little overlap for me in the books, no Biggles, no Jennings, and no cowboy books and I've no idea of the teenage joy to be had from Sweet Valley High or Judy Blume, but this is essentially a book about the joy of childhood reading and this bookworm enjoyed every page.

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