I just finished this book over the weekend. I was quite astounded by it. This is the review that I posted to Good Reads.
"Wow. I think I was in a trance when I was reading most of this work. It was as though it was the history of a nation growing up and being entirely unsure that progress was being made, told through the parable of a woman's experience as a mother. This mission in story-telling is one that I approach with excitement - both William Trevor (The Story of Lucy Gault) and Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children) have done it so well, and with devastating powers of observation. The scope here, though, is smaller than Rushdie and much grander than Trevor. It is a seismic shift, a great memoire and history. And written with startling compassion.
I was stunned how the transitions from period to period were so seamless in this story. Interior to Lagos to Wartime to Postwar. The acquisition of monies and banks and the collapse of traditions followed by the maintenance of traditions. It is a beautiful, complex world, where change and continuity overlap in the lives of the protagonist just as it does in the reader's - and where the protagonist is caught in the always confusing whirlwind of possibilities in both the present and the future. Just like the reader.
As I suggested above this is a history of Nigeria in the mid-twentieth century, told in the never satisfied but occasionally pleasant story of a mother. Nnu Ego. A beautiful mother - capable and caring and hard-working. The daughter of a great chief and hunter - attacked by an elephant and survived! - and the mother of a highly educator man (who works in the United States) and another man (who works in Canada). She is accomplished. But she doesn't realize it. And you constantly think that what she works towards, as a mother, is all for naught. The honour of her family - of her husband - is her goal, and yet she cannot achieve it no matter how much she tries.
Which makes this a very sad book. You, the reader, feel pity for Nnu. Nnu herself feels pity for herself eventually.
This story, though, is the story of motherhood and of nation, yes, but also of much more than this. Colonialism and capitalism, of change and continuity, tradition and modernity, childhood and family, friendship and work. It is a great mess - a web of believability. And this is what gives it the power it needs to be successful. Which it is, by all measures.
This is the kind of book I would want to give my mother if I knew she wouldn't be deeply saddened by it - but I have this sense that she would manage to relate to it all too well. It is beautiful."
I would highly recommend this novel - particularly to anybody wanting to add some more books to their African Literature reading lists.
