"Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: A Tale of Love, Race, and Identity

Amazon Reader: I love the way Chimamanda Ngoze Achiede draws the reader into her characters’ world. I found this engaging and moving and beautifully written.

United Kingdom on Sep 24, 2023

Pedro Manuel Carrasco De La Cruz: A great surprise to find this book. A story in which hope and resilience is transversal to every episode in the life of our protagonist. Sometimes tending to be over dramatic, it is a realistic portrait of the African experience in the African-American community of USA.

With a story which expands over more than 30 years, the timeline does never become heavy or difficult to understand. The number of characters might be a bit difficult but also enriching to the general plot, up to the taste of the reader.

Recommended for readers of contemporary literature.

Germany on Sep 15, 2023

Giovanni Maria Troianiello: Chamamanda Ngozi Adichie is a skillful and shrewd writer. Her best quality, at least in this book (the only one of hers I’ve read until now), shows up in the apparently minor, revealing detail of a sentence, a gesture, a movement of the body. At times, it seems to me, with the subtlety of a joycean suggestion: “[…] Chief said, and his guests laughed, three guffawing, knowing men,” “Mariama all the time smiling a smile full of things restrained.” Constantly, Ifemelu delights in displaying the ordinary hypocrisy of social intercourses: “ ‘Man, The Zed, you look well!’ he said, his words aflame with dishonesty,” “ ‘You sound like my mother,’ Paula said in the barbed tone of a private fight being continued, words meaning other things.” Many other examples, although often amusing, may be considered to fall into more ordinary and predictable categories, such as linguistic jokes on the triangulation of English between Nigerian, British and American peculiarities.

The architecture of the novel is powerfully conceived. It does however leave many loose threads, to the point of making a few turning points quite hard to evaluate when not hopelessly...

Italy on Jul 02, 2020

Ralph Blumenau: WARNING: "WAY TOO MANY SPOILERS" SAYS ONE READER OF THIS REVIEW.

The novel is set in the period of roughly the forty years after the 1970s. In the first two chapters we see Ifemelu, having lived in the United States for fifteen years and with a fellowship at Princeton, feeling the need to go back to her native Nigeria. She has a black American lover, but is looking forward to meeting her former boy friend, Obinze, although he is now married and has a little daughter. For his part Obinze, now prosperous as the result of having ingratiated himself obsequiously with a powerful local wheeler-dealer, feels a little thrill when he receives her email announcing that she is about to return.

The novel then flashes back to the time when they were both still at school, and later at Nsukka University, and in love with each other. America was then a magnet for many of those young people, and they envy the Nigerians who have been there or even settled there. Part of it was an idolization of American (generally popular) culture, part to get an education abroad which was not constantly interrupted by prolonged teachers' strikes, part a wish to escape from a Nigeria under a military...

United Kingdom on Jul 31, 2014

PlantBirdWoman: Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Americanah

Americanah does in fact seem to be about several things. On one level, it is simply a love story, but, more significantly, it is about the immigrant experience.

It is also about the black experience - the experience of American-Africans as opposed to that of African-Americans or of Africans. More deeply still, it delineates the complexities of national identities and ways of thinking. Much of this is accomplished through an exploration of the everyday issue of hair care.

Kinky African hair is fragile, the author tells us, and it requires special handling. Products made for white people's hair simply won't do the trick. Much of Americanah is taken up with detailing the Nigerian-born heroine, Ifemelu's, quest for hair care. We see her spending long hours getting her hair braided, and even when she decides to let her hair go natural and sport an "Afro," that style, too, takes a lot of care and is the focus of her grooming regime.

Ifemelu began life in a Nigeria which existed under military dictatorship. She attended a Lagos...

United States on Jul 12, 2014

Somi: I am probably biased towards this novel, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, not only because Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which I read as a very young girl, awoke in me the possibility of good writing and beautiful prose by a Nigerian like me, but because of the familiarity of the book. In Nigeria, we are brought up on foreign movies, sitcoms and TV shows, foreign books and foreign news, we know how English should be spoken, and many of us who bother to read a lot, are very familiar with the colloquialisms of the west. This is perhaps why, we do not recognize how much we miss our own particularly Nigerian way of expression, in the literature we read. It is perhaps why, when we read a phrase that is essentially Nigerian, in a novel like Americanah, "Tina-Tina, how now?" "Why are you looking like a mumu?" "How will you cope/how are you coping?" all familiar Nigerian modes of speech, we are infinitely grateful.

It's like the word Americanah, such a Nigerian word, used to describe someone who had lived abroad for so long, they no longer understand the nuances of being Nigerian. They use American swearwords, or complain that the fries at KFC Onikan are limp, even...

United States on May 20, 2013

MUN13: What is the difference between an African-American and an American-African? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's new novel Americanah gives you much fodder for thought if you have never stopped to think about such detailed distinctions on your own.
Although the book tells the story about the love and lives of its two central characters Ifemelu and Obinze, Americanah is essentially a book about race, the way race is perceived and the way it exists in today's modern and globalised world.
Ifemelu and Obinze meet in high school and fall head over heels in love. They come from very different backgrounds. Ifemelu's father is a former civil servant out of work and her mother is a middle class woman blinded by her prejudicial faith in God and His miracles. She encompasses everything that happens around her in the light of the lord, creating explanations that only serve her deep faith, without much touch with reality.
This is modern day Nigeria in the eighties where the military reign seeps into everyday life and Ifemelu's mother changes her church to one which is supported by the generals. When her husband's distant cousin Uju (who has come from a small village to live with them in Lagos)...

United Kingdom on Apr 25, 2013