A tragicomedy that blends traditional customs and family intrigue.
In her first play, shortlisted for the Nigeria Prize for Literature, Akpabio (Little Devils, 2013, etc.) crafts a modern morality tale about maternity, magic and being careful what you wish for.
Set largely in 2009, this tragicomedy centers on the Umoh family of Lagos, Nigeria, and draws on folk tales, Shakespearean tragedy, and the works of the poet and novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Businessman Aniekan and his wife, Celia, have been blessed with three daughters—but only after long years of barrenness. The play takes perhaps too much for granted in its line “We all know what childlessness means to the African woman,” but its characters’ effusive expressions of gratitude to God reinforce the primacy of parenthood. Celia, who secretly underwent a hysterectomy following a miscarriage, finally accepts that she cannot have more children, but her mother-in-law keeps pressuring her to bear a son; she hints that if Celia cannot produce an heir, Ani must take a second wife. The timing then seems suspect when Ani’s former secretary announces that he fathered her son, Ubong, eight years ago. Ani wants to adopt Ubong, but a jealous Celia employs a babalawo, a witch doctor, to prevent the boy from infiltrating the family. In the unfolding conspiracy to install Ubong or keep him out, many characters turn out to be not quite what they seem. Some monologues can seem overcomplicated, especially as Ani’s friend Gerry (jokingly referred to as “Sherlock Holmes”) sets out the scheming step by step. This leads to overlong text blocks, with stage directions and dialogue the only way of cramming in descriptions and machinations. The Nigerian names and British vocabulary may prove challenging, while accurate recording of African English means article and preposition use are inconsistent. Still, Akpabio successfully weaves in local superstitions and speech patterns. An interfering mother-in-law and a servant speaking in dialect (“Sir, Mama say she wan rest. She go eat later”) may seem like clichés, but they are two of the more amusing characters and bring to mind Adichie’s comic achievements. However, Akpabio maintains an appropriately bittersweet tone, even when a poisoning plot looks set to follow Hamlet into darker territory.
A tragicomedy that blends traditional customs and family intrigue.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-1847485748
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Athena Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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