Americanah: A novel

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic about star-crossed lovers that explores questions of race and being Black in America—and the search for what it means to call a place home. • From the award-winning author of We Should All Be Feminists and Half of a Yellow Sun • WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

"An expansive, epic love story."—O, The Oprah Magazine
 
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be Black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post–9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.

At once powerful and tender, Americanah is a remarkable novel that is "dazzling…funny and defiant, and simultaneously so wise." —San Francisco Chronicle

• ISBN10: 0307271080
• ISBN13: 9780307271082
• Publish Date: 14 May 2013 (first published 1 January 2013)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Knopf
• Format: Hardcover (Deckle Edge)
• Pages: 496
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780307271082

Reviews

[boghunden]

Sometimes you just know. It's hard to point out the exact place or sentence you fell in love with a particular novel.
It wasn't like that with this book. I know exactly when it happened. Page 14. Ifemelu and Blaine are talking about books that he like:

She had read many of them, because he recommended them, but they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue's memory.

That quote right there was when I knew this book would be special.

I didnt expect this book to be about love at all. Not in the sense that it was at least. It was so tender and fragile. It was beautiful, and to quote the book itself, it was poetic.

Very rarely do you come across a book that challenges your thoughts and views on the world, a book that will change you. This is one of those gems. It will stay with me for a long time, if not forever.

I'll admit I was a bit bored with the storyline in the beginning, but the writing definitely made up for it, and the story picked up soon enough. It's amazing, isn't it, how this novel spans so many years, and yet it's hard to explain exactly what it was about.

The book left me feeling empty and nostalgic. I wanted it to be longer. 600 pages wasn't nearly enough.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is such a great writer, and I'll go check out all her other books for sure.

I'll be buying multiple copies of this one and gift them at Christmas.

[luddite]

This book was... I don't know how to capture it. It's more social commentary than a novel. And a lot of the commentary is spot-on, but as a novel, the book seems very disjointed.

Maybe because I'm reading it in 2017, the race-in-America commentary didn't have much of an effect on me - the Non-American Black distinctions were interesting though. What I did like quite a bit was post-colonial Lagos of their childhood, and the drudgery of choicelessness. How they long to move away and make something of themselves. The immigrant anxieties resonated well with me - possibly because these are questions that are on my mind currently.

Ifemelu is a sharp observer of the world around her, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out her own motivations, what drove her in life, her decisions, her flights of fancy. Her character suffered from being straitjacketed to fit around the social commentary. Obinze's character didn't have that prominent component of commentary, and his character suffered for it.

I found Adichie's prose to be quite fluid though, which will get me to read her other books. I'd like to see how she does when she doesn't have the fit in a lot of commentary.

[gmcgregor]

Any time you travel, one of the weirdest and most interesting things is figuring out how to react to a different set of social norms. Ifemelu, the Nigerian-born-and-raised protagonist of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, experiences this kind of cultural whiplash twice: once, when she transfers from her university in Nigeria to a small college in Pennsylvania and then the second time, fifteen years later when she decides to return to Lagos. That Ifemelu is black and only really experiences what it's like to be black in a predominantly white world once she gets to the United States, as well as the gap between African-Americans and Africans in America inspires her to start a blog about race, which becomes a major source of income for her and helps earn her a fellowship at Princeton. Once the fellowship is over, she shuts down her blog, leaves her longtime boyfriend, and prepares to go back to Nigeria.

She's nervous about going back, not so much because she doesn't have anything lined up there but because it means she'll be back in the same place as Obinze, the man she loved in high school and college but is no longer in touch with. Adichie uses one of my favorite framing devices to structure her novel: she begins with Ifemelu just before she leaves the US, shows us how she got there through flashbacks, and then proceeds forward. I love getting some information but not all of it right up front: it makes me intensely curious to find out how the situation we first encountered came to be. I hate mystery-style books where all the "answers" are backloaded...it makes the rest of the book feel like it's treading water before the payoff at the end. Those just leave me annoyed by the time I get to the end, but unwrapping the narrative layers one by one keeps me hooked. And Americanah had me like a fish on a hook.

Not only is her story structure one that I personally respond well to, but Adichie's writing is absolutely magnificent. I marked what feels like half of the book because she has a such a knack for taking feelings that you have or you recognize and phrasing it in a way that hits you right in the gut because it's so dead on and perfect and you never thought about it like that before. And I loved the way she wrote Ifemelu and Obinze's relationship, from their charmed young love to the reason for their separation and that Adichie isn't afraid to give them new partners, partners they experience happiness with even. There's context and nuance, not just to their relationship, but to their lives. The whole book explores shades of gray, no one is either a saint or a villain. They're people, trying hard and messing up and trying again. I think one of the most important things about reading is its potential to increase empathy, to see people outside of the ones like you as having the same kinds of hopes and dreams and fears as you even if their experiences don't look exactly the same. This book is a beautifully written examplar of that exact principle. It's completely fantastic and I totally loved every second of reading it and I recommend it highly.

[inlibrisveritas]

Wonderful novel!

Full review to come

[clementine]

A lot of the issues people seem to have with this book didn't apply to me. I like that much of it was vignette style. I'm actually surprised by how many people said it lagged for them, because I devoured all 577 pages in under 48 hours. I liked that there were a lot of characters introduced and then never really heard from again; to me, it was realistic, speaking to the transience of the lives Obinze and Ifemelu were creating for themselves.

I loved the characters and I loved the writing. Both Obinze and Ifemelu were so incredibly well-developed and seemed real to me. As you know if you read my reviews, characterization usually trumps all for me when it comes to the enjoyment of a book, and the characterization was superb here. Both main characters had flaws and things that complicated them, but both were likeable. I felt like I knew them very well.

I had two main issues with the book. The first was the blog posts. I did like the posts themselves, but did not feel that they were integrated seamlessly. Their inclusion was always a bit jarring, especially because they only started appearing quite a ways into the book. I felt that they were, perhaps, a bit too obvious. The book is very clearly political anyway, and I don't think it needed to be so explicit with the blog posts. They just weren't well-integrated, like Adichie wanted to include miniature essays on race but didn't quite know how to drop them in. That said, I did like the idea of Ifemelu as a prominent race blogger - that in itself wasn't the problem, it was the (lack of) integration of the posts themselves.

And then there was the ending. I didn't hate it, but I felt like I had been tricked, like I thought I was reading a book about immigration and identity and race only to be told in the last few pages that the entire time it was actually a romance novel. It was all just a bit too neat, and it surprised me that this was the climax, that the book was building towards Ifemelu and Obinze getting back together. Maybe I was just reading it differently from how it was intended, but the romantic aspects weren't what I found compelling. I was so drawn in by the story for about 95% of the book, following Ifemelu and Obinze's lives and trials. It was just the very end that I found a bit disappointing.

Regardless, I don't think that the ending was terrible, as I said. I felt a tiny bit ripped off, but I enjoyed the rest of the book too much for it to be ruined. This is definitely one that I will revisit - not before I read more of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's other work, of course.