Book review: The Thing Around Your Neck

Published on Friday 27 March 2009 14:06

THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Fourth Estate, £14.99

CHIMAMANDA Ngozi Adichie's last novel, the Orange Prize winning Half Of A Yellow Sun, began its life as a short story about the Biafran war in Sixties Nigeria. The genesis from short story to novel makes perfect sense reading the dozen tales in her new book, The Thing Around Your Neck. Almost every one, in the way only the most satisfying short stories manage, holds the kernel of something bigger in its fist yet is simultaneously a fully realised, standalone entity. They don't aspire to be novels – that would be a bad thing – but they hum with potential. I longed to know more about each struggling, grieving character as I turned the last page of each compact and uncompromising tale. And I mean that as a compliment.

Adichie is already, at the age of 31, a formidable voice in contemporary west African literature, described by Nigerian heavyweight Chinua Achebe as "a writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers". In the title story that gift is skilfully employed in her use of the second person tense, not easily pulled off, as a young Nigerian Igbo girl ends up in Connecticut thanks to the "American visa lottery". "The thing around your neck" is, in this case, the choking alienation she feels as a result of being the 'other' in an America that casually stereotypes her as well as, on a more intimate, unspoken level, the 'other' in a mixed race relationship.

"Many people… asked when you had come from Jamaica, because they thought that every black person with a foreign accent was Jamaican," she writes. "Or some who guessed that you were African told you that they loved elephants and wanted to go on safari." The language is cool and faintly disparaging. Of her boyfriend, a right-on American whose passion for her and her continent smacks of fetishism, we get: "white people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same – condescending." We last see her at the airport about to go home and don't know whether she will return.

Adichie continues to flit between the US and Africa, from the Nigerian woman in suburban Philadelphia who learns her husband has taken a mistress back home, to the wife of a journalist queuing at the American Embassy in Lagos to apply for asylum two days after burying her son, murdered by government agents. Even when describing something so horrific, Adichie remains dispassionate and the control and distance she maintains are what make her such a good writer. "Three men in black trousers. They had smelled of alcohol and pepper soup, and much later, as she held Ugonna's still body, she knew that she would never eat pepper soup again." At its best Adichie's prose can be breathtaking in the most literal, physical sense.

Death permeates most of these stories, though tends to take place off the page. Adichie is more interested in the aftermath, the lives coloured by grief that must none the less plod on. In 'Ghosts', a retired mathematics professor runs into a man on campus who he long thought dead as a result of the Biafran war 37 years prior. The real ghost, though, is his wife, Ebere, who died three years ago but continues to visit him in the night to massage Nivea into his skin. He may be mad with grief, or he may be more lucid than the rest of us.

In both continents, Adichie's preoccupation is with class, and this is why her voice is so refreshing. Her interests lie in middle class Nigeria and the diaspora, and she tugs us out of the one-dimensional representation of Africa – the poverty, disease and civil war – that we are usually fed. In 'A Private Experience', Chika is an Igbo Christian medical student on holiday from the University of Lagos, visiting an aunt with her sister. She carries a Burberry bag and thinks religious riots are something she reads about in newspapers. We meet her, however, just after she has escaped from one and she takes refuge overnight in a store with an onion seller who happens to be a Hausa Muslim. From different classes and warring religions, these two women are momentarily united in fear and mourning. "Later," Adichie notes, "in the middle of her grief, she will stop to remember that she examined the nipples and experienced the gentleness of a woman who is Hausa and Muslim."