A Year in Reading: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Year in Reading
December 6, 2013 | 1 book mentioned 4

Related Books:

coverI most enjoyed Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings, which I only just discovered this year. Pym is funny and witty, brilliant at portraying the middle class English of the 1950s, and in particular she does the ‘psychology of femaleness’ very well.

It is a ‘slice of ordinary life’ sort of novel, that manages to be both prim and subversive, perhaps because of the matter of fact way that the contradictions of life are shown, for example the horror of the High Anglicans about the menace of Catholicism, and the laissez-faire attitude of a woman whose husband fancies her friend.

More from A Year in Reading 2013

Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005

The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles

The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews

Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.

's work has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, and Zoetrope. She is the author of The Thing Around Your Neck and of three novels, Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist, and Americanah. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

● ●
Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Deb Olin Unferth

Year in Reading
December 4, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 2

Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances: It’s easy to read this book and be entranced by the protagonist, that lone man on a quest to find the wife who has been stolen from him and replaced by an impostor. But it’s the wife who finally broke my heart. Her story runs alongside and underneath his, submerged but now and then bubbling up through the sea foam of the story—a line of her distraught dialogue, a quick description of her crying quietly on the couch. We never hear her by straight route, we are dependent on his reportage. But still we see her with clarity. She struggles with him, yells at him. She is injured, bewildered, afraid. She runs after him, flies across the world to catch up with him. She is determined to keep him, even by deception. And when he tries to get away, she tells him simply that she will stay by his side, “until the end of time.”

It’s her faith that moves me. I wish it were my own. Don’t you, don’t we? Don’t we wish his illness explained our failures? That when our husband suddenly hates us, it’s not because he has fallen out of love with us. It’s not because we have done something unforgivable—or because we don’t know how to forgive him. Or because he can’t love, or we can’t, or because we are, at core, unlovable.

It’s because he has forgotten who we are.

If only we knew the right thing to say, the password (I will stay by your side until the end of time), he would come home.

More from A Year in Reading

Year in Reading
| 1 book mentioned 2
Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Matthew Sharpe

Year in Reading
December 5, 2007 | 1 book mentioned

Matthew Sharpe is the author of the novels Jamestown, The Sleeping Father, and Nothing Is Terrible. He lives in New York City.Two books come to mind. One is Richard Powers’ novel The Echo Maker, probably the book I have thought about, talked about, and quoted from the most this year. It concerns, among other things, a guy whose trauma-induced brain damage prevents him from recognizing his own sister. Powers manages to dramatize humanely and poignantly how the postmodern notion of the self as a series of fictions, which might appear to be quite anti-scientific, is actually supported by recent neurological research into the nature of consciousness. The other book is a collection of poems called All You Have to Do Is Ask, by Meredith Walters, which I discovered a few weeks ago, and many poems of which I have already returned to more than several times. The poems are wide-ranging in their subjects (death, airplanes, soldiers, art, starfish, ecological depredation, love), elegant in their forms, exhilarating in their leaps from thought to thought, often funny, and in any given line one senses a mind on an urgent quest to discover what it believes and knows.More from A Year in Reading 2007

Year in Reading
| 1 book mentioned
● ● ●
● ● ●

4 comments:

  1. I love the whole “prim but subversive” canon. Claire Messud’s character in “The Woman Upstairs” is a type of “crazy cousin locked up in the attic” to the more well-behaved Pym characters. Their spiritual godmother is Jane Austen.

    When I think of the writing of Mailer and Hemingway, I imagine a big noisy, farting guy wrestling, drinking, wenching, and bullfighting his way through the page, with an army of quiet Pym characters bringing up the rear, wiping up the piss, blood and sweat with a sturdy cloth and ammonia cleanser, a silent universe of observation seething in their brains. Their presence is at the periphery of the page and their quietness belies what my be waiting there in the wings.

    I have sensed that same peripheral lurking in the corners of paintings of 17th Century manor houses in western County Cork in Ireland, full of dappled sunlight and green meadows. Hunting parties gallop along through the woods, masters of their domain. You might spy a picturesque garden boy in the background, making hay. He might be my great, great great grandfather, who would happily throw a very large rock at any of them within reach if he could get away with it. His descendants would then ultimately successfully oust them all and form a republic.

    It’s all in the perspective!

  3. Interesting, the write up is full of perfect rhetorism that stimulates the reader’s ego to change the reading gear forward, keep it up its a nice piece!

  4. Hi Evelyn Walsh!

    Are you the same person who published “Birthday Girl’ in Narratives? Glad to see another “chord” being struck. :)

    Moe Murph
    (Rough Week At Work — Subversion Unfortunately Limited To Slamming Door To Stall In Ladies Room In Especially Energetic Manner)

Add Your Comment:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

● ●
● ● ●
● ● ●
● ● ●