I’ll admit it...lately I’ve been pigeonholing myself. My book choices, though not consciously, have overwhelmingly been written by white American men. Maybe the occasional Western European, if I’m feeling adventurous. It’s nothing really new, my roster of favorite books is replete with these kinds of titles, from Steinbeck to Kerouac to Carver to Vonnegut. Throw in a couple of Marilynn Robinson books, a Miranda July short story collection, and The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, and you’ve got about 75% of my pick shelf at Village Books.
Thank goodness for college literature courses, or I might never have expanded my horizons. It’s frighteningly easy to gloss over works by minority authors or books written by Non-American or Non-Europeans. For one thing, there just aren’t as many to choose from. For another, it’s natural to gravitate towards works that are similar to our established favorites.
All this to say that I’ve been trying to consciously choose books out of my wheelhouse. This lead me to snagging Every Day Is for the Thief off the New and Notable Fiction shelf. Written by Teju Cole, who was born in the US but raised in Nigeria, it reads more like nonfiction or memoir than fiction. The unnamed narrator describes the experience of returning to his home in Lagos, Nigeria after 15 years in the US. Each chapter serves as a small lesson about life in Lagos, cold and bitter facts peppered with parable-like stories and situations illustrating the rampant economy of bribery and fraud that’s part of the city’s everyday life.
Comparisons to Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe are unavoidable here. While Achebe relies heavily on the oral literature tradition to tell the story of Okonkwo’s despair at the changes to his once prosperous life, Cole takes a sort of journalistic approach. It’s an indication of the difference between an author helping to usher in the beginnings of a written literary tradition in Africa, where little had previously existed, and one who has experienced what could be described as the saturation of written words we experience as Americans. Yet Cole’s writing certainly borrows from Achebe, and the oral literary tradition of Africa. Heavy on realism and detail, and exhaustively interested in what can almost seem like the mundane, both authors are compelling us to experience how it feels to them to exist on their continent. It’s a mark of their skill that their rendering of a day to day life, so very different than what most of us experience, seems accessible in these books while still, simultaneously, apart.