Book Review: Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun led me first to Wikipedia to get a little background on Biafra:

The Republic of Biafra was a secessionist state in south-eastern Nigeria. Biafra was inhabited mostly by the Igbo people (or Ibo) and existed from 30 May 1967, to 15 January 1970. The secession was led by the Igbo due to economic, ethnic, cultural and religious tensions among the various peoples of Nigeria and the creation of the new country, named after the Bight of Biafra (the Atlantic bay to its south), was among the complex causes for the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Nigerian-Biafran War.

That's Wikipedia's introduction to its section on Biafra. Half of a Yellow Sun, goes far beyond the dry facts. Adichie tells the story of the Igbo people, who were determined to establish a nation independent from Nigeria. The book starts before the civil war, when optimism is high and excitement fuels the people, and ends with the devastating defeat of Biafra.

The novel contains two intertwining stories: that of upper-class Olanna and her revolutionary husband, Odenigbo, and their houseboy, Ugwu; and that of Olanna's wealthy twin sister, Kainene, and her white lover, Richard. From lavish meals to roasted rats, Adichie follows the two families from the height of success to the daily struggle to survive.

Adichie is a phenomenal writer. Her language is lyrical, her descriptions rich, her dialog true. Her power to portray the images of Africa is astounding: the sights and smells of a country and its people are nearly palpable. The lushness of the first section of the book contrasts sharply and effectively with the starkness of latter two-thirds. We go from black party dresses to ripped rags, from a baby dressed in clean white linen to a little girl playing with shrapnel:

"Baby joined the thin children who ran around with their naked bellies wreathed in brown. Many of the children collected pieces of shrapnel, played with them, traded them. When Baby came back with two bits of jagged metal, Olanna shouted at her and pulled her ear and took them away. She hated to think that Baby was playing with the cold leftovers of things that killed."

This is an amazing book, haunting and memorable; a book that one cannot read without being staggered by the strength and will of humans to survive.

Other reviews of this book:
Caribous Mom
Jill at The Magic Lasso
Gautami at the Reading Room

(If you have reviewed this book and would like me to link to your review, please leave a link in the comments.)

Weekly Geeks #19: 2008 Favorites

This week's Weekly Geeks at The Hidden Side of a Leaf asks for our favorites thus far published in 2008. Here are the books published in 2008 I've read thus far:

Young Adult
A Beginning, a Muddle, and an End (Avi)
Jimmy's Stars (Mary Ann Rodman)

Fiction (Novels)
The Cellist of Sarajevo, (Steven Galloway)
The Fiction Class (Susan Breen)
The Miracle at Speedy Motors (A. McCall-Smith)
The Secret Between Us (Barbara Delinsky)
The Senator's Wife (Sue Miller)

Fiction (Short stories)
Unaccustomed Earth (Jhumpa Lahiri)

Memoir
The Sky Isn't Visible From Here (Felicia Sullivan)

My favorites our of all of these:
The Cellist of Sarajevo, (Steven Galloway)
Unaccustomed Earth (Jhumpa Lahiri)
The Sky Isn't Visible From Here (Felicia Sullivan)

(See more lists of 2008 favorites at Weekly Geeks !)

The Sunday Salon: War-Torn and Carnival

It doesn't seem right to put those two words in the same phrase: war-torn and carnival. First, the carnival: there is a new one that is perfect for book bloggers, aptly named the Book Review Blog Carnival. You can peruse the first carnival here at I'll Never Forget the Day I Read a Book. There are 38 reviews in all, incuding one of mine. The next carnival will be coming up on October, so if you'd like to submit a review, follow the directions here.

Moving on to the "war-torn" part of this post. For the past two weeks I've been immersed in communities and individuals ravaged by war. I've reviewed The Cellist of Sarajevo, a sparse but immensely powerful novel about the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s. I've just finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's phenomenal Half of a Yellow Sun, which is about the three-year civil war in the late 1960s when the Igbo people seceded from Nigeria to form the independent nation of Biafra. I'll be reviewing this astonishing novel soon and looking for Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, which I've been told is even better.

This week I'm back in the south with Janet Beard's Beneath the Pines. My friend Amy (my real friend Amy, not the My Friend Amy of Book Blogger Appreciation Week fame!) handed me this book a couple of days ago and said, "Read this! My son's first babysitter wrote it!" I was instantly skeptical because, well, I have no idea. I'm sure many fabulous authors were once just teenagers who babysat. But I was intrigued when I read the back cover and became immediately engrossed when I started reading it last night. Janet Beard is an excellent storyteller. I'm only a hundred pages into the book, but I'm enjoying it so much that I can't wait to head for bed so I can read for awhile.

Sunday Scribbling #130: Weddings

Today's Sunday Scribblings prompt is weddings. The Scribblings are supposed to be about my writing, I know, but today I'm sharing my writing heritage instead. My father wrote this poem for my mother on their 50th anniversary. I can't think of a more beautiful tribute to weddings.

Always Twenty-One

You are still in my heart's eye that golden girl in white,
You're walking down the aisle
into my heart,
Still that lovely girl in white
coming to me down the aisle.

In my mind I know we've had these years together,
I know the storms we've shared,
the joys we've shared,
these many years we've shared—
And yet,
And yet you're still that golden girl in white
who's coming down the aisle
into my heart.

My heart's eye cannot see the years behind us,
My heart's eye looks on you and sees again
the golden girl you were
and still are in my heart,
My golden girl who's always twenty-one.

~James N. Cummins, 1998

I still cry every time I read it. As a footnote, my parents just celebrated their 60th anniversary last month, 8/8/08.


(Read more Sunday Scribblings on weddings.)

Book Review: The Cellist of Sarajevo

"It doesn't matter what the world thinks of his city. All that matters is what he thinks. In the Sarajevo of his memory, it was completely unacceptable to have a dead man lying in the street. In the Sarajevo of today it's normal. He has been living in neither, has tried to live in a city that no longer exists, refusing to participate in the one that does."

The Cellist of Sarajevo is a small book about 22 days in what became the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, a four-year sniper and shelling campaign against the citizens of Sarajevo by Serb forces. But this story begins on May 22, 1992, when 22 people in a bread line were killed in a mortar attack. The cellist—who on that day decided not to buy bread— then begins a 22-day memorial service, playing Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor each afternoon "into the mortar-packed, sniper-infested streets of Sarajevo."

The book alternates among the stories of four main characters trapped in their own city: the cellist himself; Arrow, a sniper of snipers; Kenan, a young husband and father who must cross the dangerous city twice each week to get water; and Dragan, a baker who just wants to cross a street in safety. They were once four ordinary citizens of an ordinary city. Now they are survivors in a war-ravaged city, struggling each day to navigate in a city in which people are gunned down as if they were game pieces, picked off one by one.

It is a small book, quick to read, about a very big subject: how the human spirit insists on surviving and creating some semblance of meaning when the world has spun out of control. Steven Galloway's writing is clean and spare. The effect is powerful. Galloway's images stick. His characters are in a constant state of trying to reconcile the past and the present: this was my life then, this is my life now:

"The absence of shelling is almost like music, and she imagines if she closed her eyes she could convince herself that she was walking through the streets of Sarajevo as it used to be. Almost. She knows that in the city of her memory she wasn't hungry, and she wasn't bruised, and her shoulder didn't bear the weight of a gun. In the city of her memory there were always people out at this time of morning, preparing for the day to come. They wouldn't be shut inside like invalids, exhausted from another night of wondering if a shell was about to land on their house."

This book is based on real events that happened just 16 years ago, when I was a young married woman, buying our first car and soon to be expecting our first baby. Sarajevo, Serb, Bosnia: words on the evening news. While I shopped for a new car, people exactly like me were dashing across intersections, fervently praying that they weren't a sniper's target practice that day, trying to figure out how this happened to their lives, and when it would all end.

"There is no way to tell which version of a lie is the truth. Is the real Sarajevo the one where people were happy, treated each other well, lived without conflict? Or is the real Sarajevo the one he sees today, where people are trying to kill each other, where bullets and bombs fly down from the hills and the buildings crumble to the ground?"

Read this book. It is devastating, but the glimmer of hope is powerful, and Galloway is a language craftsman and a beautiful storyteller.

Other reviews:
Natasha at Maw Books here
Wendy at Caribousmom here
Jill at The Magic Lasso here
(If you have a review, please post your link in the comments!)

Happy National Punctuation Day

In case you didn't know, September 24 is National Punctuation Day—certainly a blog-worthy day. I must admit that I didn't make comma cookies or semicolon cake today, but I would like to give the day a nod and reprint here my review of one of my own Life Books: Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

From March 20, 2006:

How could I not love an author whose rallying cry is "Sticklers unite!"? For I am a grammar stickler, and Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss just makes me feel so happy! I love this introduction to the chapter "The Seventh Sense":

"Either this will ring bells for you, or it won't. A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near to where I live. 'Come inside,' it says, 'for CD's, VIDEO's, DVD's, and BOOK's.'
"If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once. By all means congratulate yourself that you are not a pedant or even a stickler; that you are happily equipped to live in a world of plummeting punctuation standards; but just don't bother to go any further. For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word 'Book's' with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated."

Obviously, to read a book subtitled "The Zero Approach to Punctuation," one would have to be somewhat of a grammar freak. And although I have tuned it down tremendously in the past couple of decades, the truth is that I used to find it almost impossible NOT to correct one's grammar.I used to get such incredible joy from my editorial days! How I LOVED to make those copy editor's marks.

And grammar classes in high school and college! I can't even express the pure joy in diagramming a sentence. (I am REALLY coming out of the closet now!) The satisfaction in a sentence well-diagrammed must be akin to the feeling a mathematician has at solving a big fat equation. It's all so strange, I know. It's what Lynne Truss calls "The Seventh Sense." She writes, "No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to 'get a life'...Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions."

I bet Lynne Truss is having a big party today.

The Sunday Salon: Book Overload

This past week I had a moment that was rather foreign to me: I was overwhelmed with, even tired of, books.

Like I said, it was just a moment, a fleeting panic of the sheer number of books out there. Shelves closing in, bookcases toppling, and me in the middle of a room.

I think it all has to do with the enormous number of posts this week generated because of My Friend Amy's Book Blogger Appreciation Week. This was an amazing week-long event, and I have yet to visit most of the hundreds of book bloggers who participated in this extravaganza.

The sheer number of book bloggers—people like me, who breathe books—amazes me. And I am delighted with and curiously touched by our drive to share books. On the other side of things, I regularly come across people in daily life, whether in person or on blogs, who really never read. Who say, "I can't remember the last time I read a book."

Anyway, I did quickly recover from my momentary book exhaustion. This week I finished The Cellist of Sarajevo, which I've not yet reviewed, and gods in Alabama, which I needed after reading the Cellist. I finally reviewed Songs in Ordinary Time, which will definitely not make my Top 10 list this year. I've just started Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, which promises to be excellent.

I had fun this week with Weekly Geek's Quote Week. I didn't quite get seven quotes in, but contemplating book quotes again adds to the feeling of the vast world of book lovers.

(To join The Sunday Salon, click here!)