Issue 18: Love In The Time Of Literature
Thoughts on Anna Karenina, Chika Unigwe's Better Late Than Never, and a few updates.
Hello and welcome to another edition of Book and Banter! I’m excited — I’m always excited to write to you. I’m also excited because I’m trying to be more deliberate about my consistency this year and so far, I might have it on lock (not me trying to jinx it). Pro tip: Use a content calendar.
Anna Karenina (and something about film vs literature)
My first memorable experience of love and romance in literature was that summer holiday I discovered Anna Karenina beneath a pile of my dad’s books. It was a large copy with a glossy cover; a beautiful woman lay on an ottoman. Back then, the binds were still intact (this wasn’t the case after a week of reading). It was the opening line that drew me in: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” — which some argue is one of the best opening lines in the history of literature.
Several pages down, I discovered the title character, Anna Karenina, who first piqued my interest in gender and politics. Since then, I’ve read and completed Anna Karenina at least four times — it has 800 pages. The only other books I’ve read with such fervor are Chicken Licken (oh how the names excite me!) and Purple Hibiscus.
Set in 19th Century Moscow, The plot of Anna Karenina is not in the least simple. It has layers of politics, class, society, adultery, and family life. As a 14-year-old, one of the strongest appeals was the affair between Anna Karenina, who was married and had a son, and Vronsky. The affair was chaotic and like a lot of literature of that era, ended in tragedy. Anna Karenina went from rejecting Vronsky to loving him to sheer desperation for him.
I enjoyed the layered complexity of the novel — love in its most human form. It opened my eyes (after years of saying things like “love is blind,” “love is wicked” — no thanks to Bridge and Lace — “love don’t cost a thing,” after the 2003 movie with Nick Cannon) to some of the realities of love, which romcoms and pop culture masked carefully. It makes me wonder about adaptations and the process of turning a book into a film (is it possible that this might be part of the reasons we prefer the book versions to adapted films? I haven’t done enough study on this to have an answer.)
It’s not that I don’t love romcoms — I absolutely do (I definitely recommend The Holiday and Bridget Jone’s Diary —old but gold) it’s that they’re not a great picture of reality. I watch them and reimagine what worldly love is like in an alternate universe (and boy did I fantasize about them as a kid: in one of my fantasies, I’m Raven Symoné and Devon is my husband. If you know, you know). Maybe in an ideal world, the prince will always marry the princess. But in literature, Juliet is going to drink that sleeping potion, Romeo will think she’s dead and kill himself, Juliet will wake up, see Romeo dead, and kill herself. This is not in any way saying “happy ever after” and happy endings are utopia. I’m just saying that it helps to provide a balanced view of anything — and I said a bit of this in last week’s letter about tropes.
Better Never Than Late
That’s perhaps why I enjoyed reading Chika Unigwe’s Better Never Than Late, a compilation of short stories published in April 2020. My reading of political and socially conscious novels is almost always restrained to the mundanity of life. Like love or music or food. I always find these more appealing than the excess layers. There’s an age-old conversation here about the African writer as a social thinker. This is a note to writers who consciously tackle heavy themes: what’s the everyday quality of your storytelling?
Leaving Home
In Better Never Than Late, the theme is migration and all the sacrifices one has to make when one leaves. I have separate thoughts on this topic, which I’d like to explore in narrative journalism. Still, I’m interested in reading novels about young Nigerians in the twenty-tens and now in the twenty-twenties and their own migration struggles. Preferably written by young Nigerians.
The romantic cliché is overused in film and sometimes in literature. So it’s always nice to see variety and diversity. Love in Better Never Than Late is refreshing. It asks the reader to put themself in the shoes of the character and make tough choices: what are the costs of leaving everything you love, of finding love in a new place? None of it is improbable, we are in the middle of a brain drain. While circumstances might be different, the experience of leaving home is similar.
In the first story, “Transfiguration of Rapu”, we experience the narrow ways in which love is defined: you must love just one person and must lie to protect that person. In the second story, “Finding Faith” there are themes of loss and the culture shock that happens when you leave. Fundamentally, there’s how loss creates a wedge between lovers and the place of forgiveness in love. We can’t pretend, without considering the divine, that forgiveness is an easy thing or that loss is a simple thing. In the title story, Kambi is convinced by Ada her cousin that the housegirl, Ijeoma is the reason Kambi has remained unmarried. This leads to a rather dreary and detailed exorcsim exercise that eventually makes Kambi feel sorry. Things we do for love, aye?
All of this said I'll definitely recommend it if you’re into short stories, why not? The stories are interconnected, intimate, and can be shocking.
As a lover of structure (even though I don’t practice what I preach), I’m determined to bring back some semblance of structure in my letters to you. On the first, second, and last Thursday of the month, you should expect a short review (of a story, movie, event, experience, etc.), an interview with a creator, and a list of what I’m currently enjoying. On the third Thursday of the month, a Thursday like this, you’ll find a full-on review of a novel I read in the past month. If there are books you’d like for me to read & review, creators you want me to interview, just shoot me an email.
What I enjoyed this week:
Next week, I’ll send you a letter on building with a short interview with one amazing editor/publisher.
Till next week.