FICTION: SORCHA HAMILTONreviews The Thing Around Your NeckBy Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Fourth Estate, 218pp, £14.99
THERE IS often something terribly lonely about the characters in short stories. Unlike novels, whose characters are explored and scrutinised over days and chapters, the protagonist in the short story is permanently at a remove, frequently frozen in some sad, irredeemable experience. And long after the story is finished, their predicament haunts us – like Gabriel at the end of Joyce's The Dead,watching the snow falling gently, or the doomed couple in Chekhov's The Lady With The Little Dog, "forced to live in different cages" until the end of time. The loneliness of the immigrant is a recurring thread in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's new collection of short stories. Adichie places her characters in a liminal moment – between cultures, traditions and time – where the future is weighted with both fear and excitement. A woman queues for hours in the baking sun outside the American embassy in Lagos. A young mother, struggling to adapt to life in a wealthy, white suburb in Philadelphia, suspects her husband has a mistress back home in Lagos. A Nigerian girl, newly arrived in the US, begins to discover that "white people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little, were the same".
Adichie sprang to international reknown with novels Purple Hibiscusand Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize in 2007. In these stories, some of which have appeared in Granta and The New Yorker, she returns to themes of dislocation, poverty and the fallout from the Biafran war. And once again, Adichie carefully weaves the political and the personal to give a searing insight into the varied, often tragic experiences of her characters and the relationship between Nigeria and the West. The warm, sometimes hopeful undercurrent in many of these stories is often punctuated with flashes of anger at the injustices of poverty, war and the hardships of life as an immigrant. Observing an American family, a Nigerian babysitter in On Monday of Last Week begins to wonder about the anxieties "that come with too much food".
In The Arrangers of Marriage, the husband tells his newly arrived Nigerian wife he doesn't want to be known as the people who fill the apartment block "with smells of foreign food". At times, however, comparisons between the homeland and the adopted home are overly simplified – the US is depicted purely as corrupt and corrupting, for example, a land of obesity and triviality, where the honest, traditional ways of life back home have no place.
Adichie is at her best in stories like Ghosts, in which an old professor thinks he sees a man who died 37 years ago in the war, and The Headstrong Historian, which explores the tragic impact of missionaries on the lives of a widow and her son. By creating just the right pace and setting, she allows these narratives to unwind and flourish in the short story form. A few others, however, feel more like excerpts from novels, and end somewhat unevenly, like Jumping Monkey Hill.
The title story, The Thing Around Your Neck,is perhaps the most haunting. The protagonist, who is struggling to settle into her new home in the US, cannot escape the disconnect between her and her new white boyfriend.
While he does not show her off, like some “exotic trophy, an ivory tusk”, anger begins to brew when he shows her a photo of his parents’ country home and she wonders why it’s called a cottage when buildings that big in her country are banks and churches. She says nothing, but she knows something is wrong, some bigger, unspoken feeling is lurking, a choking loneliness – “the thing around your neck”.
Sorcha Hamilton is an Irish Timesjournalist