Monday, April 4, 2016

Americanah



Interview on NPR’s Fresh Air from June, 2013
Author’s website
Unofficial, but informative, website
LitLovers
Brief interview on the BBC from January 2016
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About Nigeria:
British influence and control over what would become Nigeria and Africa's most populous country grew through the 19th century. A series of constitutions after World War II granted Nigeria greater autonomy. After independence in 1960, politics were marked by coups and mostly military rule, until the death of a military head of state in 1998 allowed for a political transition. In 1999, a new constitution was adopted and a peaceful transition to civilian government was completed. The government continues to face the daunting task of institutionalizing democracy and reforming a petroleum-based economy, whose revenues have been squandered through corruption and mismanagement. In addition, Nigeria continues to experience longstanding ethnic and religious tensions. Although both the 2003 and 2007 presidential elections were marred by significant irregularities and violence, Nigeria is currently experiencing its longest period of civilian rule since independence. The general elections of April 2007 marked the first civilian-to-civilian transfer of power in the country's history and the elections of 2011 were generally regarded as credible. The 2015 election is considered the most well run in Nigeria since the return to civilian rule, with the umbrella opposition party, the All Progressives Congress, defeating the long-ruling Peoples Democratic Party that had governed since 1999.


total: 923,768 sq km
land: 910,768 sq km
water: 13,000 sq km
country comparison to the world: 32
Area - comparative:
about six times the size of Georgia; slightly more than twice the size of California
Ethnic groups:
Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, is composed of more than 250 ethnic groups; the most populous and politically influential are: Hausa and the Fulani 29%, Yoruba 21%, Igbo (Ibo) 18%, Ijaw 10%, Kanuri 4%, Ibibio 3.5%, Tiv 2.5%
Languages:
English (official), Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo (Ibo), Fulani, over 500 additional indigenous languages
Religions:
Muslim 50%, Christian 40%, indigenous beliefs 10%
Population:
181,562,056
note: estimates for this country explicitly take into account the effects of excess mortality due to AIDS; this can result in lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, higher death rates, lower population growth rates, and changes in the distribution of population by age and sex than would otherwise be expected (July 2015 est.)
country comparison to the world: 8
Citizenship:
citizenship by birth: no
citizenship by descent only: at least one parent must be a citizen of Nigeria
dual citizenship recognized: yes
residency requirement for naturalization: 15 years
Suffrage:
18 years of age; universal
Executive branch:
chief of state: President Maj. Gen. (ret.) Muhammadu BUHARI (since 29 May 2015); Vice President Oluyemi "Yemi" OSINBAJO (since 29 May 2015); note - the president is both chief of state and head of government
head of government: President Maj.Gen. (ret.) Muhammadu BUHARI (since 29 May 2015); Vice President Oluyemi "Yemi" OSINBAJO (since 29 May 2015)
cabinet: Federal Executive Council appointed by the president
elections/appointments: president directly elected by 'qualified' majority popular vote and at least 25% of the votes cast in 24 of Nigeria's 36 states; president elected for a 4-year term (eligible for a second term); election last held on 28-29 March 2015 (next to be held in February 2019)
election results: Muhammadu BUHARI elected president; percent of vote - Muhammadu BUHARI (CPC) 53%, Goodluck JONATHAN (PDP) 46%
Legislative branch:
description: bicameral National Assembly consists of the Senate (109 seats - 3 each for the 36 states and 1 for Abuja; members directly elected in single-seat constituencies by simple majority vote to serve 4-year terms) and the House of Representatives (360 seats; members directly elected in single-seat constituencies by simple majority vote to serve 4-year terms)
elections: Senate - last held on 28-29 March 2015 (next to be held in February 2019); House of Representatives - last held on 28-29 March 2015 (next to be held in 2019)
election results: Senate - percent of vote by party - NA; seats by party - APC 60, PDP 49; House of Representatives - percent of vote by party - NA; seats by party - APC 225, PDP 125, other 10
Political parties and leaders:
Accord Party or ACC [Mohammad Lawal MALADO]
All Progressives Congress or APC [John Odigie OYEGUN]
All Progressives Grand Alliance or APGA [Victor C. UMEH]
Democratic Peoples Party or DPP [Biodun OGUNBIYI]
Labor Party or LP [Alhai Abdulkadir ABDULSALAM]
Peoples Democratic Party or PDP [Uche SECONDUS, acting]


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Africa’s First City:
Almost anywhere else in the developing world, such a sentiment would seem pitiably delusional. In Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial center, “Be Very Rich” has all but become the city’s motto. The country recently recalculated its gross domestic product to take into account sectors of the economy that barely existed two decades ago. As a result, Nigeria determined that its GDP surpassed South Africa’s in 2012 to become the continent’s largest economy. About 15,700 millionaires and a handful of billionaires live in Nigeria, more than 60 percent of them in Lagos.
As with other African metropolises, oil-enriched Lagos has long nurtured an elite class only marginally inconvenienced by the squalor enveloping the city as a whole. Now the upper class is expanding, and despite persistent income inequality, so is the middle class. The growth of the latter in Nigeria, according to a 2013 survey by Ciuci Consulting, a strategy and marketing firm in Lagos, is driven by the expanding banking, telecommunications, and services sectors, particularly in Lagos. Nigeria’s middle class grew from 480,000 in 1990 to 4.1 million in 2014, or 11 percent of households. Seemingly overnight, Lagos has transformed itself into a city of Davids clamoring to become Goliaths.
This is a great African success story. And how lovely it would be to tell this bright, uplifting tale while ignoring altogether the dark and demoralizing saga of Nigeria’s grotesque terrorists, which has blocked the boomtown narrative from the world’s consciousness like a lunar eclipse. But Lagos does not exist in a parallel universe, any more than the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram does. Both are indigenous to Nigeria, a vast West African nation teeming with industrious strivers like Adeoti but also with poverty, despair, and violence. If anything, the miracle of Lagos is that its economy gallops onward even when fettered by the same federal incompetence that allows terrorism to go unchecked. A lesser city would be crippled. Then again, in a sense so is Lagos.
Here is the story, in brief. Following centuries of tribal rule by territorial kings and emperors and 99 years of British colonial rule, Nigeria achieved independence in 1960 and was intermittently ruled by military heads of state until 1999, when it at last achieved a rickety state of democracy. Among its 36 states, Lagos—which includes the sprawling port city of the same name—was ever the country’s center of power, even when the federal capital was relocated in 1991 to Abuja, a 450-mile drive away. Still, Lagos deteriorated under decades of military rule. Its schools, roads, and hospitals went to seed. Western investors kept their distance. When Karim returned from England to his birthplace in 1996 to build on the family cocoa business, there were very few of his kind, “because,” he told me, “it wasn’t an open economy, and financial services were few. Back then the total capital of a bank was maybe two million dollars. Imagine you want to do business in Lagos. How much can a bank like that possibly lend you? Fast-forward to today—they’ll lend you up to $500 million!”
What happened to Lagos stemmed from a convergence of two phenomena. First, after knowing only political incompetence, the newly democratized Lagosians elected a pair of remarkably consequential state governors: former accountant Bola Tinubu in 1999, and in 2007 his handpicked successor, Babatunde Fashola, who has been credited with helping quash an Ebola outbreak in Lagos. The two executives restored some fiscal sanity to Lagos while investing in bridges and expressways. Meanwhile a reverse diaspora transpired as native Nigerians began to return home. When the worldwide recession foreclosed opportunity in Europe and America, Lagos offered itself as a new frontier for ambitious entrepreneurs. One of them, Lanre Akinlagun, told me, “Back in the U.K., all of my friends started moving back to Lagos. When they’d return to visit, we’d meet in a bar, and they’d buy a round of shots. But then later they’d come back and order up bottles of the most expensive stuff. I told myself, OK, something’s going on here.”
On the Atlantic coast and consisting of a slab of mainland around a lagoon and several islands, Lagos today is an ad hoc ecosystem thrashing with wealth seekers. Tourism is largely absent here—one comes to Lagos strictly to do business—and yet at the same time it is a strangely inviting place, a city of optimists.
That is not to suggest that life in Lagos is a smooth ride. As with all boomtowns, the city is at pains to keep up with itself. Lagos’s population is growing so fast and is so transient that it’s impossible to estimate the number of inhabitants more precisely than between 13 million and 18 million. The hubs of commerce are the two small islands of Lagos and Victoria, and only the very wealthy can afford to live there.
=====================

Read-alikes for Americanah

Find more read-alikes in NoveList.

Americanah
By: Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi
A young woman from Nigeria leaves behind her home and her first love to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected.
Read-alikes
1.  
A man of the people

Achebe, Chinua
Reason:  Americanah and A Man of the People depict issues that were important to Nigerians decades ago and are still significant today. Each stylistically sophisticated, psychologically complex novel examines the effects of cultural differences, political corruption, and prejudice on the characters. -- Katherine Johnson
2.  
All our names

Mengestu, Dinaw, 1978-
Reason:  These haunting, elegantly written novels focus on the struggles of African immigrants seeking refuge from their home countries and facing difficulties assimilating to new cultures. Both books offer touching personal stories enriched by incisive sociopolitical commentary. -- Derek Keyser
3.  
Mambo in Chinatown

Kwok, Jean
Reason:  Though Mambo in Chinatown centers on a young Asian American in Manhattan's Chinatown, and Americanah a Nigerian immigrant to America, both women are torn between two cultures, unsure of where they belong. Americanah is more stylistically complex, Mambo more straightforward. -- Shauna Griffin
4.  
We need new names

Bulawayo, NoViolet
Reason:  Though the African characters' countries of origin are different (Nigeria in Americanah; Zimbabwe in We Need New Names), each of these novels vividly portrays the cultural, social, and economic differences between the characters' homes and First World countries. -- Katherine Johnson
5.  
Foreign Gods, Inc.

Ndibe, Okey, 1960-
Reason:  Unlike Americanah, Foreign Gods involves illicit (even illegal) money-making schemes, but both novels portray the challenges and dilemmas of Nigerians living in other countries. -- Katherine Johnson
6.  
The Master Butchers Singing Club

Erdrich, Louise
Reason:  These books are Moving, Stylistically complex, and Character-driven, and they share: the genres 'Love stories' and 'Literary fiction' and the subject 'Immigrants'. Characters are: Authentic and Complex.
7.  
Under the udala trees

Okparanta, Chinelo
Reason:  These books are Moving and Stylistically complex, and they share: the genres 'Political fiction' and 'Literary fiction' and the subjects 'Nigeria' and 'Refugees'.
8.  
Stork mountain

Penkov, Miroslav
Reason:  These books are Moving, and they share: the genres 'Political fiction' and 'Literary fiction' and the subject 'Immigrants'. Characters are: Complex.
9.  
How to read the air

Mengestu, Dinaw, 1978-
Reason:  These books are Moving and Stylistically complex, and they share: the genres 'Political fiction' and 'Literary fiction' and the subject 'Immigrants'.
==============

Read-alikes for Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi

Find more read-alikes in NoveList.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes character-driven novels and short stories about life in Nigeria and America. Her prose is luxuriant and highly evocative; you'll feel as though you're in the thick of the jungle or the middle of a shabby apartment in New York City. Adichie's characters are equally as compelling. They will continue to resonate within you long after you've finished reading. Violence, injustice, and despair stand shoulder to shoulder with compassion, bravery, and love in her fiction. Adichie shows that family and friends are the foundations upon which are our lives are built. Start with: Purple Hibiscus.
Read-alikes
1.  
Lahiri, Jhumpa

Reason:  Jhumpa Lahiri and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie conjure evocative literary fiction about the fraught relationships between first-generation immigrants and their home cultures. They tell of the quest to both assimilate and to establish an individual identity in lyrical, complex prose. -- Mike Nilsson
2.  
Matthiessen, Peter

Reason:  Peter Matthiessen and Chimamanda Adichie write fiction that focuses on outsiders -- exiled Florida frontiersmen for Matthiessen and expatriate Nigerians for Chimamanda. Their character-driven work is as bleak as it is lyrical; both feature evocative atmospheres and moving story lines. -- Mike Nilsson
3.  
Tan, Amy

Reason:  These authors' works are Moving, Lyrical, and Character-driven, and they share: the genres 'Literary fiction' and 'Historical fiction' and the subject 'Immigrants'.
4.  
Chabon, Michael

Reason:  These authors' works are Moving, Romantic, and Stylistically complex, and they share: the genres 'Literary fiction' and 'Historical fiction' and the subjects 'Immigrants', 'Men/women relations', and 'Murder'.
5.  
Bloom, Amy, 1953-

Reason:  These authors' works are Moving, Stylistically complex, and Lyrical, and they share: the genres 'Literary fiction' and 'Historical fiction' and the subject 'Immigrants'.
6.  
Donoghue, Emma, 1969-

Reason:  These authors' works are Moving and Character-driven, and they share: the genres 'Literary fiction' and 'Historical fiction' and the subject 'Immigrants'.
7.  
Doctorow, E. L., 1931-

Reason:  These authors' works are Moving, Stylistically complex, and Lyrical, and they share: the genres 'Literary fiction' and 'Historical fiction' and the subject 'Refugees'.
8.  
Cather, Willa, 1873-1947

Reason:  These authors' works are Moving and Character-driven, and they share: the genres 'Literary fiction' and 'Historical fiction' and the subject 'Immigrants'.
9.  
Selvadurai, Shyam, 1965-

Reason:  These authors' works are Moving and Character-driven, and they share: the genres 'Literary fiction' and 'Historical fiction' and the subject 'Immigrants'.


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Sunday, March 6, 2016

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

Some websites with some additional information on Mary Anning, Lyme Regis, and fossils:

Lyme Regis Museum  -- fossils

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Fossil Hunter Mary Anning celebrated in Lyme Regis
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Review of the book:
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'Where archeology and reality meet" discusses Elizabeth Philpott:
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….. The Lyme Regis coastline is marked by high, crumbly cliffs along the shore which, as they extend east and west from Lyme Regis, expose nearly the full array of rock formations of the Mesozoic Era, the some 200 million years of the Age of the Dinosaurs, beginning about 251 million years ago. This area was a sea at this juncture. Some of the names of the formations laid down at the time and now exposed here are delightful. Anning spent a significant amount of time searching material from the Jurassic Period’s Blue Lias Formation, a mix of limestone and shale which, apparently, was named for the bluish color of the rock and, either the pronunciation of “layers” in the local dialect or, as Emling would have it, the Gaelic word for “flat stone”. The Charmouth Mudstone Formation is another key Jurassic formation, subdivided into various layers including the Shales-with-Beef Member made of mudstone and given its named because it includes a series of thin beds with the appearance of sliced beef. The 150 foot high cliffs to the east of town are known as Black Ven. (Discovering Fossils, on the web, provides a great introduction to the geological formations in the area.).....
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hints for fossil hunting around Lyme Regis:

Collecting fossils

Fossils collected on the beach at CharmouthFossils collected on the beach at Charmouth

  • The best, and safest, place to look for fossils is on the beach where the sea has washed away soft clay and mud.
  • Do not hammer into the cliffs, fossil features or rocky ledges.
  • Keep collecting to a minimum. Avoid removing in situ fossils, rocks or minerals.
  • The collection of specimens should be restricted to those places where there is a plentiful supply.
  • Only collect what you need – leave something for others.
  • Never collect from walls or buildings. Take care not to undermine fences, bridges or other structures.
  • Be considerate and don’t leave a site in an unsightly or dangerous condition.
  • Some landowners do not wish people to collect – please observe notices.




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Author’s home page:
Author US Tour in March for new book :  At the Edge of the Orchard
23 March, Bookshop Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 7pm
24 March, Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA, 12 noon
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Interview with Tracy Chevalier
==================================
…...My latest book, Remarkable Creatures, is particularly about a woman named Mary Anning, the fossil hunter, but I knew I wanted there to be a different perspective. Mary was not educated, she didn’t travel, and I felt like we as twenty-first-century readers need a broader view. Also, in religious terms, there were people who saw fossils as a challenge to their ideas about religion, and I wanted to be able to present both sides: people who felt, God created fossils and it didn’t affect their religious beliefs; and those whom fossils did challenge. So I wanted two sides of the argument, and I found out that Mary had this friend who was a middle-class woman twenty years her senior, named Elizabeth Philpot. It made perfect sense to have the two of them tell the story and get a more complete picture. So it comes organically out of the story, but you don’t always know right away. Sometimes it takes a lot of fiddling around, or rewriting a whole draft from a different point of view.
You’ve written about real characters before, such as Johannes Vermeer and William Blake, but they were tangential characters in those novels. Mary Anning is very much center stage in Remarkable Creatures. Was it a constraint to write about a real person, about whom quite a lot is known?
Mary Anning, prior to 1842
Mary Anning, prior to 1842
It was both an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that you don’t have to make it up, which is great, because my imagination is limited! I had the skeleton structure of her life, where she was at more or less any given period; she didn’t move around much, and lived in Lyme Regis all her life. There were highlights of her life, so the peaks are of the story are built in, and that’s great. The disadvantage is that those peaks don’t always happen the way we as readers would like them to. I had to fudge the chronology a little bit, more in this book than in other books.
Vermeer and Blake are both central to the concept of their books, but they’re not the main players, and it’s much easier to make up stuff around them without it actually affecting their chronology. Whereas with Mary Anning, between two important things that happened there’d be a three year gap. And I’d go, “Oh, three years? This is outrageous!” The thing is, back then people had very different lives from us. She used to go out on the beach every day, and the same things would happen year after year. Our lives are much more varied than that, and we’re used to reading about people with more varied lives.
Day after day isn’t great for narrative. So in the first draft I kept all the dates, then I put it all together and thought, oh, this drags a bit—who needs to know that this happened and then there were three or four years before that happened? And I thought: why don’t I just take off the dates? It was an incredible liberation. All my other books have dates that separate the sections, and it’s very clear when things take place. This time I’ve stripped them all out, and it was a great relief. There are three dates that are mentioned, one on which an auction takes place, one when she finds anichthyosaur, and one when she finds a plesiosaur. I think those are the only specific dates in the book. Everything else is kind of a mishmash. Readers don’t mind it at all—no one’s said to me, “I don’t get this, you know that three years have gone by there?” Once you look at it in a different way and allow yourself that leeway, it makes it a lot easier.
….
How do you use your research, which might be quite dry and academic, and bring it to life the way you do? What’s the mechanism for taking facts and using them to recreate the past in a way that’s vibrant?
I put the story first, and the characters. The history always has to be secondary. I don’t want to be a teacher, I want to be a storyteller, and I want to prop up what I write with something that’s going to give it validity. That’s where the history comes in. I wasn’t a history major; I wasn’t that interested in history until I was in my thirties, and even now, I’m only interested in history when I’m writing a book. I’m interested in that era and I want to read everything about it, find out about it, sort through all the junk to find the little glittering things that are going to work. That sorting gives me the confidence to set something during a particular period. It makes me know, when a character walks into the house, what the dimensions of the rooms are, what she’s wearing, what she’ll do when she comes in—does she take off a hat and gloves, what kind of shoes does she have, what’s she going to eat? When I’m writing books I tend to see history not as about who’s prime minister or president at the time, but more about what people’s everyday lives were like, and how they differed from ours.
You’ve talked before about how you like to get your hands dirty when you’re researching a novel. You took painting classes when you were writing Girl with a Pearl Earring and you went to a tapestry studio for The Lady and the Unicorn. Apart from looking on the beach for fossils, what did you do forRemarkable Creatures?
That’s pretty much what I did! Mary and Elizabeth were very interested in fossils, that was their obsession, and so I had to spend a long time on the beach, looking. It requires a lot of patience, a way of being that doesn’t happen just going out once. I had to go a lot. I’ve got a lot better at finding things than I was at the beginning, because of all the time I put in. And there’s a whole gallery in the Natural History museum of London which is full of the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs that Mary Anning found. I spent a lot of time looking at them. Other than that, Elizabeth Philpot collected a lot of fossil fish, and when she died her nephew gave her collection to the Natural History Museum in Oxford. They have her stuff in all these big trays in back rooms, and I spent a very happy day pulling them out and looking. Some of the labels are in her hand, they’re original, and it was so amazing to hold these things, to hold what she found, prepared and cleaned, and studied, and wrote the labels for. And there’s the label, still there. I always love the hands-on, not just doing but also feeling. It’s like a talisman to touch something that my characters have touched. William Blake had a notebook that he used to write his poems in. They have it at the British Library, and when I was researching Burning Bright, I managed to talk them into letting me look at it, and hold it, and turn pages. It was so amazing.
……
Remarkable Creatures hangs on the unusual friendship between Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot. What appealed to you about portraying a close friendship between two women?
Circa 1895, two women.
Image Credit: Flickr
I think the best books are about a relationship that changes over time. Somebody described the novel once as normal-change-new normal. People’s lives are measured by their relationships with other people. Maybe because I’m not particularly romantic, I don’t write in general about romantic relationships, although Vermeer’s relationship with Griet was certainly romantic. I’m more interested in the day-to-day relationships that we have. With Mary and Elizabeth it was just so unusual, because Mary was a working-class woman and Elizabeth was a middle-class woman, and that’s a huge difference, then and now too—you know we sort of say everything’s wide open, but honestly are there many people who cross paths? Do we have any working class friends? Not really. So that’s still there, though it’s less rigid, less codified in society now than it was.
Then it was very strict. And also, Elizabeth was 20 years older than Mary, which was unusual. But they were good friends. Lyme Regis was isolated enough that you could get away with unconventional behavior. Also, these women did not marry. They did not have the romantic relationships I would have written about. There’s a bit of it but very little. They had each other and that had to suffice—it more than sufficed, I think. They got on very well, bonded by this love of fossils. I guess I’m interested in more than the romantic template we’ve grown up with. Jane Austen wrote about romantic relationships—also about family relationships and sisters—but really in the end, Elizabeth Bennett ends up with Mr. Darcy and that’s the thing that matters. I thought, that’s all very well in a novel, but in real life that’s not always how it happens. And I wanted to know, what happens to the women who don’t get married? This is what happens to them: they have the sort of friendships that sustain them.
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Read alikes from NoveList
Read­alikes
1. The edge of the Earth Schwarz, Christina Reason: Though it lacks the dark psychological elements of The Edge of the Earth, Remarkable Creatures is another elegantly written, atmospheric historical fiction novel featuring a strong, complex female protagonist within a vividly rendered coastal community in the late 19th century. ­­ Derek Keyser
2. The French lieutenant's woman Fowles, John, Reason: If you liked the setting and historical detail of Remarkable Creatures and would like to read another book involving fossils in Lyme Regis, albeit with a romantic twist, you may want to read The French Lieutenant's Woman. ­­ Rebecca Sigmon
3. Chocolat Harris, Joanne, 1964­ Reason: Remarkable Creatures and Chocolat are richly evocative, lyrical novels about women who find themselves exiles in their small European hometowns as their unmarried status and unusual hobbies provoke gossip and ill will. ­­ Rebecca Sigmon

4. Pictures from an expedition Smith, Diane,­ Reason: While the tone and writing style is different, Remarkable Creatures and Pictures From an Expedition are detailed historical fiction about women dinosaur ­fossil ­hunters. Historically, these are unusual women because of their archaeological interest and knowledge. ­­ Rebecca Sigmon

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