The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In “Ghosts,” one of the twelve short stories in The Thing Around Your Neck, a new collection by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, an aging college professor must confront a former colleague, presumed dead, who had fled Nigeria during a revolution that threatens the campus. Professor Nwoye must confront Ikenna Okoro about defecting, about the lack of sympathy he shows when informed of the deaths of both Nwoye‘s wife and daughter, but he doesn’t. The story’s momentum builds but never reaches the climactic moment. Instead:

“Another dust whirl, both of us blinking to protect our eyes, made me ask Ikenna to come back to my house with me so that we could sit down and talk properly, but he said he was on his way to Enugu, and when I asked if he would come by later, he made a vague motion with his hands that suggested assent. I know he will not come, though. I will not see him again.”

The story doesn’t end here, however. Nwoye’s mind wanders and from the initial conflict unfolds a touching hallucination of his dead wife, who the reader realizes is, even after death, Nwoye’s only companion.

Most of Adichie’s stories work in this way. An initial conflict is established, but dissolves at the point when it should combust. It seems as though it should be frustrating for the reader, but in every story it reveals more of her characters than any combustion ever could.

These characters range from impoverished brush women to the wealthy wives of African businessmen. “Jumping Monkey Hill” centers around Ujunwa, a character that is, possibly, the author herself. Ujunwa does what none of Adichie’s other characters are capable of doing and confronts her tormentor—the professor who leads her writer‘s workshop. The results are uncomfortable, to say the least, and the story concludes:

“There were other things Ujunwa wanted to say, but she did not say them. There were tears crowding up her eyes but she did not let them out. She was looking forward to calling her mother, and as she walked back to her cabin, she wondered whether this ending, in a story, would be considered plausible.”

Ujunwa’s own varied life experiences—from using her body to sell bank accounts to African businessmen to struggling with sexual harassment at a writing seminar for gifted African writers—is what allows readers to accept the variety of characters Adichie presents. Her writing is strong and straightforward, but what shines in her stories are Adichie’s narrators and how fully she inhabits their minds. The main character of the titular story describes falling in love as “the thing that wrapped itself around your neck, that nearly choked you before you fell asleep, start[ing] to loosen, to let go.” In one haunting sentence, Adichie is able to put across how ambivalent her character is and how falling in love only begins to solve her problems.

This collection of stories proves Adichie is a writer capable of startling depth and able to fully access even the most obscure character’s mind and this is a stunning new collection.

Reviewed by Megan Harrington

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Knopf Publishing Group, 2009
Cloth, 240 pp, $24.95
ISBN-10: 0307271072