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Summary
Summary
A heartbreaking story about a Nigerian poultry farmer who sacrifices everything to win the woman he loves, by Man Booker Finalist and author of The Fishermen , Chigozie Obioma.
"It is more than a superb and tragic novel; it's a historical treasure."- Boston Globe
Set on the outskirts of Umuahia, Nigeria and narrated by a chi, or guardian spirit, An Orchestra of Minorities tells the story of Chinonso, a young poultry farmer whose soul is ignited when he sees a woman attempting to jump from a highway bridge. Horrified by her recklessness, Chinonso joins her on the roadside and hurls two of his prized chickens into the water below to express the severity of such a fall. The woman, Ndali, is stopped her in her tracks.
Bonded by this night on the bridge, Chinonso and Ndali fall in love. But Ndali is from a wealthy family and struggles to imagine a future near a chicken coop. When her family objects to the union because he is uneducated, Chinonso sells most of his possessions to attend a college in Cyprus. But when he arrives he discovers there is no place at the school for him, and that he has been utterly duped by the young Nigerian who has made the arrangements... Penniless, homeless, and furious at a world which continues to relegate him to the sidelines, Chinonso gets further away from his dream, from Ndali and the farm he called home.
Spanning continents, traversing the earth and cosmic spaces, and told by a narrator who has lived for hundreds of years, the novel is a contemporary twist of Homer's Odyssey . Written in the mythic style of the Igbo literary tradition, Chigozie Obioma weaves a heart-wrenching epic about destiny and determination.
Author Notes
Chigozie Obioma is a Nigerian novelist who wrote, The Fishermen, and will be featured at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2015 program. He made the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2015 shortlist. He also made the shortlist for the UK¿s £10,000 (A$21,394) Guardian First Book Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in Umuahia, Nigeria, Man Booker finalist Obioma's unforgettable second novel (after The Fishermen) follows the saga of Chinonso, a young and doomed poultry farmer. The story is narrated by Chinonso's chi, the guardian spirit that bridges humans and the divine in Igbo cosmology; this narrator functions as both advocate and Greek chorus in the tragedy that unfolds. Orphaned and broken by his father's death, Chinonso spends his life in isolation caring for his beloved chickens, until he sees a woman preparing to jump to her death off a bridge. She turns out to be Ndali, the daughter of a prominent local family. Suicidal in the wake of a broken engagement, Ndali is drawn to Chinonso's fierce protectiveness of his flock, seeing in him a steadiness and resoluteness of character, but she's blind to the anger and sorrow at his core. The two quickly fall in love, despite her family's mounting objections. In a bid to win their approval, Chinonso takes up an old acquaintance on the offer of university education in Cyprus, selling his family's property and possessions to pay for it. The con is painful and clear as day; Chinonso is robbed blind and left stranded in an alien land. After he meets a sympathetic nurse, a moment of violence lands Chinonso in jail, where he must bide his time-still burning with a violent determination to reclaim the life he lost and punish those responsible. Obioma's novel is electrifying, a meticulously crafted character drama told with emotional intensity. His invention, combining Igbo folklore and Greek tragedy in the context of modern Nigeria, makes for a rich, enchanting experience. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The story seems familiarly simple. A man and a woman fall in love, but their happy-ever-after is fraught with obstacles. Yet nothing is quite that straightforward in Obioma's (The Fishermen, 2015) latest, starting with his narrator, who happens to be a 700-year-old chi (guardian spirit) who inhabits Chinonso, a young Nigerian poultry farmer more bonded to his fowl than any human companions. Chinonso meets Ndali when he prevents her from committing suicide, but their relationship cannot survive her wealthy family's rejection of Chinonso because of his humble circumstances. Determined to prove himself worthy, Chinonso sells everything he owns to pursue a university education in Cyprus, only to make the bleak discovery that he's entrusted his future to a primary-school friend who has utterly betrayed him. His determination to return to Ndali is all that keeps him alive. By having Chinonso's chi serve as storyteller, Obioma alchemizes his contemporary love story into a mythic quest enhanced by Igbo cosmology, centuries of history revealed through glimpses of the chi's past hosts, elements of autobiography conjuring Obioma's own Cyprian education and his meeting a fellow Nigerian whose dire experiences initially sparked the novel. Magnificently multilayered, Obioma's sophomore title proves to be an Odyssean achievement.--Terry Hong Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE HEARTBEAT OF WOUNDED KNEE: Native America From 1890 to the Present, by David Treuer. (Riverhead, $28.) This response to Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" highlights the numerous achievements of Native Americans over the past century, and celebrates their resilience and adaptability in the face of prejudice, violence and the many other obstacles placed in their way. HARK, by Sam Lipsyte. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) The attraction and repulsion between a would-be messiah and his apostle anchors this madcap skewering of contemporary culture packed with fake gurus, cheating spouses, junk-food obsessions and yoga. INHERITANCE: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love, by Dani Shapiro. (Knopf, $24.95.) A DNA test submitted on a whim upends Shapiro's assumptions about her family history and forms the basis for her new book, a searching exploration of the power of blood ties to shape our sense of who we are. AN ORCHESTRA OF MINORITIES, by Chigozie Obioma. (Little, Brown, $28.) A sweeping epic centered on a fraught romance between a humble poultry farmer and the daughter of a prosperous chief, Obioma's new novel travels from rural Nigeria to Cyprus and to the cosmic domain of the Igbo guardian spirit who watches over and recounts the proceedings. ARISTOTLE'S WAY: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, by Edith Hall. (Penguin Press, $27.) Aristotle was concerned with how to achieve a virtuous, happy life. Hall sees his answer as a source of great comfort, his most important insight being that people need to find their own purpose and search out a middle way - "nothing in excess," the philosopher said. THE WORLD ACCORDING TO FANNIE DAVIS: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers, by Bridgett M. Davis. (Little, Brown, $28.) Davis's heartwarming memoir honors her remarkable mother, who made a good life for her family in the '60s and '70s. THE FALCONER, by Dana Czapnik. (Atria, $25.) In this electric debut novel, 17-year-old Lucy's coming-of-age is powerfully shaped by her encounters with basketball and New York City itself, even as she constantly brushes up against the constrictions society places on her sex. IN MY MIND'S EYE: A Thought Diary, by Jan Morris. (Liveright, $24.95.) The beloved nonagenarian writer shares a year of observations - of herself and of the changes she's observed. TO NIGHT OWL FROM DOGFISH, by Holly Goldberg Sloan and Meg Wolitzer. (Dial, $17.99; ages 9 to 12.) Told in a series of frantic emails and other correspondence, this hilarious novel follows two girls who have never met - one in California, one in New York - who learn that their single dads plan to marry each other. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Guardian Review
The Man Booker shortlisted author is back with The Orchestra of Minorities, a novel that grew from a life-changing event during his student days in Cyprus When Chigozie Obioma came up with the idea of writing a novel from the point of view of a person's "chi" - the animating spirit that, in Igbo cosmology, every living thing contains - his heart sank. It seemed to the 33-year-old that as a writing exercise it was too weird and too hard, besides which, how would he even describe it? "Really I didn't want to do it that way at all," he says, in the restaurant of a New York hotel. "That's the thing with me; any time I come up with an idea for a novel, I'm drawn to a very grand, almost cosmic structure that I try to push away. But as time goes on, and as the story builds, it's almost as if without this frame it would not make sense. So I would just go ahead, even though I knew it would be very difficult to navigate." The result is An Orchestra of Minorities - Obioma's second novel after his Man Booker-shortlisted debut The Fishermen - an Odyssey -like story in which a poultry farmer from Nigeria undertakes a journey to prove himself worthy of the woman he loves. Chinonso, a man whose chi dithers constantly over how much to interfere in his host's fortunes, falls in love with a wealthy woman called Ndali, whom he saves from jumping off a bridge and in so doing aligns his destiny with hers. The novel is a study in what happens when a man loses control of his life and is subject to forces - in this case, the corrupt middlemen who persuade Chinonso to hand over lots of money for a place at university in northern Cyprus, and the racism he confronts on arrival - greater than his own. The idea for the novel, Obioma says, grew out of something he witnessed when he was himself a student in northern Cyprus. Some of the strongest parts of the book describe the hideous plight of Nigerian students, tricked into handing over large sums of money to gain access to Europe via Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus, only to discover, on arrival, that from an immigration perspective the country is not even part of the EU. Obioma wasn't subject to this scam himself; his parents were wealthy enough to avoid going through middlemen and to pay the university direct. When he arrived, however, it was clear to him that "95% of the Nigerians I met in Cyprus had been through these middlemen and had lost money." And he says the universities are benefiting. "When I left Cyprus in 2012, there were about seven universities. Now there are about 15, because it's so lucrative. Now I hear that Cameroonians are flocking there because of the war." The impetus to write the novel came out of what happened to Obioma's friend, Jay, a Nigerian man he met in the first days of starting college. Jay had been duped by the middle men both into thinking the university in Cyprus would be a springboard into Europe, and that his degree would enable him to make lots of money. Instead, he confronted the reality that not only had most of the funds he'd handed over to fixers been embezzled, but that he was now stuck in northern Cyprus, where there were no jobs and where his status as a Nigerian immigrant made him widely despised. After a heavy bout of drinking, Jay was found dead at the bottom of a lift shaft, where he was assumed to have fallen accidentally. Some of the strongest stories begin with very simple archetypes. And you work your way from that "One thing that I was always thinking about in the aftermath of the tragic death," Obioma says, "was that Jay had mentioned, during the few days when I met him, that he had come to Cyprus in the first place because of the woman he was betrothed to - he needed to make money quickly. And I found myself often thinking about her. We had no way to contact her. The university contacted his mother, and they took his corpse back to Nigeria. But we were nobodies. And I was always thinking: what happened to her?" It is a fascinating premise for a story, along the lines of the movie An Affair to Remember , in which one half of a couple waits endlessly for the other, who will never turn up. These sorts of cliffhangers are not supposed to be possible in the age of the mobile phone, in which no one is kept in the dark about anything. But as Obioma's novel makes clear, this assumption overlooks the vastness of these immigrant journeys, in which the silencing effect of shame, failure and poverty effectively renders technological advance almost irrelevent. As a result, An Orchestra of Minorities has about it the air of a timeless story, premised on archetypes from a much earlier age. "I believe that some of the strongest stories we can have begin with very simple archetypes," says Obioma. "The great mother, or the great father, for example. And you work your way from that, slowly, to more complexity. The idea of this guy who wants to be with the woman he loves - you can say the same of the movie Gladiator , for instance. If you strip everything down to the basics, it's just about Maximus wanting to go back to his wife and every other thing stopping him. Even Homer's Odyssey ; he just wants to go back and the entire universe is conspiring against that ambition." Obioma's own journey ended in a much happier place. He is the fifth of 12 children, the son of a banker who, as Obioma puts it, "pulled himself up by his bootstraps. His dad died when he was 10, and he funded his education by being a manservant to wealthy families." Obioma's father is a big reader and while his mother "had only a primary school education, she encouraged us". Obioma was an academic stand-out in the family: "I found reading to be an escape. I was a recluse. I would always be the one hiding, and reading". His parents were adamant that he enter a profession and, as they put it, not "waste" his promise on something like writing. "They wanted the best for me. They didn't want me to be poor." Under their influence, he agreed to study engineering at a university in Nigeria, but was desperately unhappy and left before graduating. He then won a place at a university in Britain, but the Home Office withdrew the offer of a visa before he could take it up. Finally his parents found the university in northern Cyprus, where, against the odds, Obioma flourished, and wound up staying on to teach. Eventually, he applied and won a place to do a writing fellowship at the University of Michigan, and it was there that he completed his first novel, The Fishermen . The success of that debut, which describes the lives of four brothers living in a small town in Nigeria and which was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2015, finally put paid to his parents' anxieties. Obioma now lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he teaches at the university and occasionally struggles to remember which language to operate in. He is quadrilingual, speaking Igbo, the language of his father, as well as Yoruba, which is widely spoken in the south west of Nigeria where Obioma grew up, plus English and, thanks to his sojourn in Cyprus, Turkish. There are some advantages, he says. "There are some rhetorical moves that I wouldn't be able to make if I didn't know these languages. In terms of writing figurative language, I probably pull a lot from Yoruba imagery. I was reading from the book at the launch and there is a phrase I thought about afterwards. It was that to Chinonso, Ndali was the thing 'his soul had been longing for with tears in its eyes'. And I thought, how did I come up with the idea of somebody's soul crying? And I imagine it was from the folklore that my mum would tell me - the word soul is used a lot in the Yoruba language, more than you would find in English." At other times, being quadrilingual becomes difficult. "After learning Turkish my English was affected, and for a while it was very difficult for me to speak in an articulate way extemporaneously. But then it got better. The languages eventually meshed and things realigned, but for a while it felt like something had gone wrong somewhere. Sometimes I wish I could divest myself of some of these languages." One of the joys of his new novel is the way that it interweaves western religion and philosophy with Nigerian thought systems, without any obvious hierarchy. It was his intention, he says, to trace the locus of Igbo cosmology as it is vested in the idea of the "chi". So, he says, "the idea of the chi comes from the basic principle that where one thing stands, another thing stands beside it. We believe in the duality of everything; we believe that nothing has meaning if it cannot be compared to something else. Beauty has no meaning if there is no such thing as ugliness. If you exist in a corporeal form, there must be a double in the spiritual realm. The chi is your spirit double." In An Orchestra of Minorities , Obioma posits this theory in opposition to that of free will - the Christian idea, embedded in western political and judicial institutions, that a person is not governed by a spirit force, but is entirely responsible for their own moral choices. The resultant conflict informs the question underpinning Chinonso's tragic arc: to what extent is he culpable in his own downfall? While there are flashes of humour, and Obioma himself is full of merriment, the novel comes to a gloomy conclusion. "People always ask me, why do your stories end this way? And honestly," he says, "I want to write a feelgood story. But I think that because I'm fascinated with the metaphysics of existence, I keep thinking why, of all the people who came to Cyprus, was it Jay who died? Or, I read not too long ago of a nine-year-old doing her homework and there's a drive-by shooting and a bullet comes in through the roof and kills her. She didn't do anything to deserve that fate. When you think about these things, and you want to write fiction around that, the path it takes you to can feel inevitable and tragic." The impulse to write in the first instance may come from a place of optimism - Obioma says that he was partly motivated by a desire to salvage Jay's death from meaninglessness - but the bottom line remains that, whether one construes the larger forces to be spiritual or political, Jay, and so many other victims of seemingly random deaths, "didn't do anything to deserve that fate". Illuminating that fact honours the author's friend as it powers his fiction.
Kirkus Review
A modern love story that examines what a person might do for loveand whether fate can render those efforts moot.In his follow-up to The Fishermen (2015), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Obioma has written a romance with a Nigerian ethos, reinvigorating age-old questions of love and destiny. When Chinonso Solomon Olisa, a lonely poultry farmer, intervenes in the suicide attempt of Ndali, a young woman, his quiet life is disrupted and the two begin an intense and complicated affair of nearly mythic proportions. The story of their relationship is told by Chinonso's chi, or his life force, who has come to testify before the almighty creator on his host's behalf because Chinonso may have killed a woman. The book operates on both physical and spiritual levels, presenting thought-provoking and sage observations about the nature of loneliness ("the violent dog that barks interminably through the long night of grief") and jealousy ("the spirit that stands at the threshold of love and madness"), among other things. Indeed, though the love story that moors the book is dramatic and lends itself to comparisons with similarly epic romances such as The Odysseya point not lost on Chinonso's chithe book tells a distinctly Nigerian story that considers the gambits people are willing to make in an effort to rise above their lot.A deeply original book that will have readers laughing at, angry with, and feeling compassion for a determined hero who endeavors to create his own destiny. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Influences like Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare's Othello, and The Divine Comedy inform Obioma's examination of the Igbo tribe's cosmology of destiny vs. the Christian tenet of free will. This conflict is told through the compelling narrative voice of a "chi," or guardian spirit, as it appeals to the gods on behalf of its host, the chicken farmer Chinonso Solomon Olisa. A chance encounter on a bridge with a woman named Ndali who is contemplating suicide changes the trajectory of Chinonso's life in devastatingly unforeseen ways. He and Ndali, a student of pharmacology, engage in a love affair troubled by her influential family's disapproval and his deep insecurities. She is entranced by Chinonso's simple farming life, the respect he holds for his ancestral lands, and the affection he displays for his animals and birds. Yet in an ironic twist he secretly plans to sell it all for a ticket to Cyprus and a university degree that he believes will secure her family's esteem. Obioma overwhelms readers with a visceral sense of Chinonso's humanity, his love, his rage, and his despair as he struggles between fate and self-determination. VERDICT Nigerian writer Obioma blazed into the literary firmament with The Fishermen, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, but this second, more ambitious and imaginative novel may be the one that cements his name in readers' minds. [See Prepub Alert, 7/1/18.]-Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
