AMERICANAH
Updated: Aug 28, 2021
I used to be an avid reader from childhood to high school; although as life happened I have not been able to commit to a book ( or to anything really ) especially if not connected to my uni course. For background knowledge, I studied pharmacy for my undergraduate which, not tooting my own horn, is a very intense course. So after graduating this summer, July 2021, I decided to pick up one of the many books that I had bought over the years, dusted it and proceeded to take it one page at a time and see where it will go.
I did not expect to fall in love so fast....
'Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie'.
As an immigrant student, I could visualise every little event, drawing from my personal experiences to stories I have from other people. I could see through Ifemula's eyes, all the ups and downs, all the challenges and victories.
I simply could not put this book down.
I have felt the homesickness
I have felt the frustration
I have felt the pressure
I have have different, the difference culturally and more....
I am a sucker for romance and this did not disappoint; the characters were stellar, we follow Ifemula and Obinze as teenegers in secondary school falling in love, and as they grow together through to university. They drift apart while in different countries and live completely different lives. Years later they reconnect in Nigeria and have to make one of the hardest decisions in their lives.
"When I started in real estate, I considered renovating old houses instead of tearing them down, but it didn’t make sense. Nigerians don’t buy houses because they’re old. A renovated two-hundred-year-old mill granary, you know, the kind of thing Europeans like. It doesn’t work here at all. But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past.”