Book review: The Thing Around Your Neck / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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(note added after this review was written:

It’s a tragedy when one’s heroes turn out to be made of tin and paper. I was in awe of Naipaul until I began finding his writing problematic and could take it no more. And now here’s Chimamanda Adichie — her writing blew me away, and she turned out to be a TERF! I’m going to die without any heroes.)

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The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a collection of short stories first published in 2009. So yes, I was late to the party considering this is now among my favourite books of 2020 and also among my all time favourite short story books.

There are 12 stories in the book with all but one centred on a female protagonist. They don’t vary much in style except for the voice: most stories are either in the first person or third person, and one of them — my favourite in the collection — is narrated in the second person. The stories are set in a specific milieu: middle class Nigerian women (or man, as in one story) dealing with circumstances beyond their control. The loss of a loved one, the betrayal of a spouse, escalating political violence and alienation following migration. They speak of displacement, of unexpected and unwelcome change triggering a reassessment of one’s life. Except for the last story — The Headstrong Historian — which doesn’t fit in that mold.

While the stories are personal narratives centred on the individual, they are also observations on society. They speak not only of the motivations of the protagonist, but also of her context whether in Nigeria or America.

And my favourite stories among the 12?

Ghosts: The only story in the book with a male protagonist. A widower reminiscing about a life lived, choices made, friends lost and found, and family. It’s narrated with tenderness and is mellow — like a gentle breeze in a meadow, though with an ending that’s both startling and funny.

The Headstrong Historian: The story which seems to be fundamentally different from the other stories in the collection. Deeply moving and yet — for a short story — almost epic in scale, covering multiple generations in its scope. In a way its positioning at the end of the collection seems apt — while the stories that appear before this one zoom into the personal, this story zooms out over time and place, a macro view that encapsulates within it all those other stories. Then again, maybe it should have been placed at the beginning, a prediction of those stories that are yet to come.

(My favourite, the titular story) The Thing Around Your Neck: Told in the second person, it’s a story of migration, race, class and gender politics and alienation in a foreign land. This story was probably the seed from which Americanah sprouted in 2013. There is an undercurrent of rage running through it and I’m struck by how powerful it feels. It’s as if I can sense the earth tremble as I stare at a volcano, I know it will explode any minute now but I don’t run away, I can’t. Instead I stare transfixed waiting for it to explode, knowing its fury will consume me.

I read this book 11 years after it was first published, but that story alone was so worth the wait.