Walking on Cowrie Shells
Ratings1
Average rating5
15
Ratings1
Average rating5
A virtuosic debut collection that roves across genres and styles, by a finalist for the Caine Prize In her powerful, genre-bending debut story collection, Nana Nkweti’s virtuosity is on full display as she mixes deft realism with clever inversions of genre. In the Caine Prize finalist story “It Takes a Village, Some Say,” Nkweti skewers racial prejudice and the practice of international adoption, delivering a sly tale about a teenage girl who leverages her adoptive parents to fast-track her fortunes. In “The Devil Is a Liar,” a pregnant pastor’s wife struggles with the collision of western Christianity and her mother’s traditional Cameroonian belief system as she worries about her unborn child. In other stories, Nkweti vaults past realism, upending genre expectations in a satirical romp about a jaded PR professional trying to spin a zombie outbreak in West Africa, and in a mermaid tale about a Mami Wata who forgoes her power by remaining faithful to a fisherman she loves. In between these two ends of the spectrum there’s everything from an aspiring graphic novelist at a comic con to a murder investigation driven by statistics to a story organized by the changing hairstyles of the main character. Pulling from mystery, horror, realism, myth, and graphic novels, Nkweti showcases the complexity and vibrance of characters whose lives span Cameroonian and American cultures. A dazzling, inventive debut, Walking on Cowrie Shells announces the arrival of a superlative new voice.
Reviews with the most likes.
Did not work for me: half the stories I couldn't figure out the context, and those I did, I couldn't relate to the characters. That almost entirely has to do with my demographic — old, male, with little room for shallow petty nasty toxicity in my life; not Nkweti's target audience at all. Almost entirely. Another part of my inability to enjoy it was, I think, Nkweti's voice. It felt to me like she tried too hard: her sentences too precise, her settings too hip, calculated to give just the bare minimum information so as to leave the reader struggling, tossed overboard but within sight of land, all the reader has to do is work hard enough and we'll get it. But I just didn't work hard enough. Or maybe I'm not smart enough.
The stories are varied in content and voice, with a few common elements: youth, loneliness, cultural pressures to babymake, and of course racism/sexism. But it just felt flat; like the first one, narrated first-person by an utterly banal person, but her language comes off instead like someone Woke writing a caricature of a shallow unselfaware ideal. It was forced.
Favorite story: The Living Infinite, near the end. That was complex and sweet and thoughtful.
About three stars, but unrated because I don't want to pull down the rating for a new and talented writer who I sincerely wish to read again.
