Book Review: Americanah
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This book crept up on me a bit. It’s been getting a lot of buzz, so I thought it would be immediately captivating, thought-provoking, and profound. Alas, while it is well-written and empathic, I wouldn’t say that the profundity is all that obvious right away.
Instead, I would say that the characters are sharply drawn and clever, the kind of people whose perspective is interesting to read. To be sure, they are just a shade too angelic - the cloud of quiet dignity that surrounds Ifemelu, Obinze and his mother is just a little bit suffocating at times. Yet they are good people whose strengths are admirable, thoughts are complex and easy to sympathize with, and whose flaws are just sufficient to make them believable. Put simply, I enjoyed reading Ifemelu’s musings on her surroundings and the people she encountered.
It’s only as the book starts going that we start to dive into the many themes taken up by this book - immigration, racism, and sexism, in large part, with all three being symbolically woven together (as it were) through Ifemelu’s many musings on the problem of hair care for Nigerian women. While a tone of preachiness does creep in to the author’s thoughts on these themes, there is at the same time an altogether understandable yearning for home, in the sense of a time, and place, and social milieu, in which one feels comfortable, and I think Ifemelu’s perspective is impressively illuminating, as far as that goes.
A more subtle theme, and one which I quite enjoyed, was that of voice and literature, embodied most obviously in the form of Ifemelu’s blog. There’s a real feeling in this book that Ifemelu and Obinze are speaking with a sort of rarified voice - well, rarified to the degree that Americans think of British English as rarified, which I’d say is, a lot - which is contrasted, quite cunningly, with the colloquial voice of Ifemelu’s blog. Why the blog is written in a voice so different from Ifemelu’s is not entirely clear, although Obinze picks up on it right away; we’re left to speculate. My own guess is that the blog is meant to be yet another skin that Ifemelu is trying on (similar, in some ways, to the way she straightens her hair or adopts a totally new social circle while dating Curt,
While I enjoyed reading the book, I do wish it had been a little less bludgeon-y with its social commentary, in some cases. The “Hair as a metaphor for race” blog post, for example, made a point I had already picked up, and in a similar way I do think a bit more nuance as regards, say, sexism, would not be a bad thing.