The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[roadrunnertwice]

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - The Thing Around Your Neck - 1/12/2010 (#2)

Adichie first caught my attention with an excellent talk she gave at TED (via deepad). This is a collection of her short stories. (And here is a thing she did for McSweeney's, because why not.)

My favorites of these—possibly not the best, but definitely my favorites—were "On Monday of Last Week" and "Tomorrow Is Too Far;" the former for its unexpected familiarity, and the latter for its alien chill.

"The Headstrong Historian" was also pretty grand, and its prose and voice were wrought into this cool jump-to-hyperspace shape where time kept moving faster and faster, which was an awesome trick because structurally it's an origin story, right, which usually have the reverse shape, except that the character who originates in it is, in fact, dedicated to uncompressing the past (or one of the pasts) and giving it room to finally breathe, which, structural and narrative unison, yey!

And "Jumping Monkey Hill" was both depressing and very very funny, and I kind of want to believe it's a roman à clef about Adichie herself, since that would basically turn the story into an infinitely recursing spiral of META. (Incidentally, is it too late to invent Death Meta? Can I start a band where we get up there and sing about singing about mutilation, and between songs we'll talk about the ways in which various other bands downtune their guitars? Seeking bassist.)

There's a bunch more, it was all pretty good.

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Sidebar: Given the recent religious/ethnic violence in Nigeria, it seems like I should have something to say about "A Private Experience," but I don't, really. I actually didn't like it much. I don't like most stories set in pogroms; they just make me heartsick and exhausted, feeling neither entertained nor enlightened. I don't know.