Americanah
Ratings147
Average rating4.3
15
Ratings147
Average rating4.3
From the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, a dazzling new novel: a story of love and race centered around a young man and woman from Nigeria who face difficult choices and challenges in the countries they come to call home. As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are leaving the country if they can. Ifemelu-- beautiful, self-assured-- departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze-- the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor-- had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, and she and Obinze reignite their shared passion-- for their homeland and for each other-- they will face the toughest decisions of their lives. Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today' s globalized world: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie' s most powerful and astonishing novel yet.
Source: https://www.recordedbooks.com/title-details/9781470388928
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Americanah is book that was mentioned several times when I asked for contemporary fiction recommendations. This is a journey, away from and back to the heroine's country of Nigeria and her childhood love, along the way sharing with us her brutal, enlightening, comical, destructive, empowering experiences. An annoyingly didactic tinge crept in at times, but Adichie's beautiful writing and powerful sense of place pulled me along.
As thoughtful, nuanced, incisive commentary and reflection, it is difficult to find fault with this work. As a work of narrative fiction, however, it does have its limitations. It's hard to escape the feeling that the narrative arc is only a vessel for the observational aspects. I can't help but think that what the author really wanted to do was to write an incisive essay about these issues, or perhaps a series of short stories that examined the intersection of race and national identity through a more personal lens, but knowing that essays and short stories don't get broad attention and readership, she had to find a way to craft a novel instead. This results in an awkward narrative structure, where too much time is put into expositional dialogue that feels like it has been written to explain rather than to reveal. The result is that the work feels bloated and the pace plodding at times. The snippets of blog posts seem to be the most authentic, well written and visceral parts of the book, but it just feels like what she really wanted to do was write a book of the blog content, and felt forced to turn it into literary fiction.
I do recommend this book. I did enjoy reading it, and appreciated it's thoughtfulness, but couldn't love it as a complete novel.
So. Good.
I've been reading this book off and on for nearly six months. No matter what, though, I never lost the thread of the narrative. I was never confused about the current situation I had left a few weeks prior, nor why the characters were acting the way they were. It's so well written, it was impossible to forget what was happening in the story.
It's beautiful and I loved it.
This is my favorite book I've read in several years.
