The Thing Around Your Neck
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- 9,49 €
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- 9,49 €
Publisher Description
From the award-winning, bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists—a dazzling story collection filled with "indelible characters who jump off the page and into your head and heart" (USA Today).
In these twelve riveting stories, the award-winning Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explores the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie's signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Throughout her short-story collection set in both Nigeria and the U.S., Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie makes wry, empathetic, and precise observations of human behavior. The pieces set in Nigeria tell of struggle and integrity in the face of injustice, poverty, and frustrated hopes. Those are counterbalanced by stories that examine what’s gained and lost in escaping to America, a country that, as one character observes, is all about “give-and-take.” Like a customs officer inspecting psychological baggage, Adichie itemizes the freedoms and possibilities that her characters gain—along with the illusions and parts of themselves they must leave behind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun) stays on familiar turf in her deflated first story collection. The tension between Nigerians and Nigerian-Americans, and the question of what it means to be middle-class in each country, feeds most of these dozen stories. Best known are "Cell One," and "The Headstrong Historian," which have both appeared in the New Yorker and are the collection's finest works. "Cell One," in particular, about the appropriation of American ghetto culture by Nigerian university students, is both emotionally and intellectually fulfilling. Most of the other stories in this collection, while brimming with pathos and rich in character, are limited. The expansive canvas of the novel suits Adichie's work best; here, she fixates mostly on romantic relationships. Each story's observations illuminate once; read in succession, they take on a repetitive slice-of-life quality, where assimilation and gender roles become ready stand-ins for what could be more probing work.
