Year: 2020
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Language: english
File: PDF, 381 KB
A Novel Relié – 4 août 2020
PDF-The Death of Vivek Oji-PDF
Synopsis:
What does it mean for a family to lose a child they never really knew?
One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son's body, wrapped in a colorful cloth, at his feet. What follows is the tumultuous and heartbreaking story of a family's struggle to understand a child whose mind is both sweet and mysterious. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers from disorienting memory holes, moments of disconnection between himself and his environment. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in his friendships with the warm and turbulent daughters of Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerians. But Vivek's closest bond is with Osita, the socially-driven cousin whose confidence teases masks a protected privacy. As their relationship deepens - and Osita struggles to understand the escalation of Vivek's crisis - the mystery gives way to a heartbreaking act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom.WikiPedia
With a dynamic reading, full of unforgettable characters, The Death of Vivek Oji is a novel about family and friendship that defies expectations - a dramatic story of loss and transcendence that will move every reader.
PDF-The Death of Vivek Oji-PDF
Book review:
One of the strengths of this novel is writing, prose and really beautiful images. "If this story were a pile of photographs - of the old kind, rounded at the corners and kept in albums under the glass and lace doilies of the central tables of salons across the country ..." I was struck by the recurrence of the photographs, both those imagined as above and the actual ones reflected in the program of the funeral of Vivek "The program was filled with photos of Vivek as a little boy a baby; nine of them looked like him now. It was as if whoever selected the photos had decided to end the timeline ... that he wanted to make it look like he was someone else." And at the end, real photos, so touching, so revealing.Good reads
Although this story concerns the death of a young man, it is not a spoiler as obviously reflects the title and the first chapter of a sentence. It became more than his story and that's where my weakness lies - too many relationships in a novel that isn't very long and sometimes those relationships seemed to me to be additions. For me, this has diluted in some way Vivek's heartbreaking story. I wanted to know more about Vivek through his own reflection -"So: If no one sees you, are you still there?" I wanted to know more about Vivek, and not just about how he was perceived by others.
The author does a wonderful job of representing their grief - his cousin Osita, bound to Vivek by much more than blood, but no more than Vivek's mother, Kavita. It is a story about identity, Nigeria in the 1990s, about the beauty of acceptance, which unfortunately comes too late. Mixed feelings, so it's right in the middle for me with 3 stars. The plus for writing.
(Warning for those who might have a problem, there are some graphic sex scenes).
PDF-The Death of Vivek Oji-PDF
Revue de presse:
Advance praise for The Death of Vivek Oji:
“[A] dazzling, devastating story . . . A puzzle wrapped in beautiful language, raising questions of identity and loyalty that are as unanswerable as they are important.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Electrifying” —O: The Oprah Magazine
“Brilliant . . . This is a book full of line-level beauty; a book of multiple perspectives, each rendered organically and fully; a book of mystery and community and love. . . . A special read that will not soon be forgotten.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black
“Remarkably assured and graceful. . . . Emezi has once again encouraged us to embrace a fuller spectrum of human experience.” —The Washington Post
“This affecting novel of self-invention . . . poses searching questions about gender and acceptance.” —The New Yorker
“Extraordinarily powerful.” —Edwidge Danticat, The New Yorker
PDF-The Death of Vivek Oji-PDF
“Remarkable and daring.” —The New York Times Book Review
“The arrival of a major talent.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Akwaeke Emezi parts the seas of the self.” —Vanity Fair
“Like watching the beginning of something big.” —Vox
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