When does loyalty flow from love, and when from shared adversity or heritage? “Half of a Yellow Sun” explores these questions through the twins’ uneasy relationship.
And both novels shrewdly observe the women - the wives, the daughters - left dangling over that chasm. Both “Half of a Yellow Sun” and Adichie’s first novel, “Purple Hibiscus” (which won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize), explore the gap between the public performances of male heroes and their private irresponsibilities. Like Nadine Gordimer, she likes to position her characters at crossroads where public and private allegiances threaten to collide. But whenever she touches on her favorite themes - loyalty and betrayal - her prose thrums with life.
But although she uses history to gain leverage on the present, Adichie is a storyteller, not a crusader.Īt times Adichie’s writing is too straightforward, the novel’s pace too slack. If, at independence in 1960, Nigeria was “a collection of fragments held in a fragile clasp,” in 1967 that clasp snapped, unleashing the three-year Biafran War that saw Muslim-dominated forces from the north laying siege to the Christian Igbo of the south, who sought to secede from Nigeria after the widespread massacre of their people.Īt once historical and eerily current, “Half of a Yellow Sun” honors the memory of a war largely forgotten outside Nigeria, except as a synonym for famine. ARE we ready for a novel about an imploding nation riven by religious strife and bloody wrangling over who controls the military, the civil service, the oil a novel about looting, roadside bombs, killings and reprisal killings, set against a backdrop of meddling foreign powers? A novel in which several once-colonized peoples chafe against the nonsensical national boundaries that bind them together, in which citizens abandoned on the highways of fear must choose between a volatile federation and destabilizing partition?Ĭhimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s second novel takes place not in the deserts of contemporary Iraq but in the forests of southeastern Nigeria - 40 years ago.
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