This is a book of power, a special read that will not soon be forgotten. This is a book full of line-level beauty a book of multiple perspectives, each rendered organically and fully a book of mystery and community and love. There is a great power in Emezi’s words, an energy that reminds us that the body is only a beginning and that life is hard to reduce or contain. There is lush tenderness even as the novel’s titular violence hovers over the reader like a specter. There is exploration of self and sexuality, there are friends that become family, there is so much.Īkwaeke is able to render a world that feels vital and true. This compelling and beautifully written story begins in 1968 during the Biafran civil war in Nigeria, creating a unique setting of hardship, hunger, and death afflicting the people living in the area. We see, as the novel unfolds, who Vivek was as a child and the journey that was a life ended too quickly. Even as Vivek is mourned deeply, we discover many of those that are shattered by the loss refused to see and really accept Vivek in life. We are then taken on an incredible journey through and around the life of Vivek, who is a young person from southeastern Nigeria. Raised by a distant father and an understanding. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family’s struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious.
What happens to a person denied the space to be themselves? What does it look like to choose yourself? What is it to be, to exist, even against a multifaceted external denial? What can bloom when a person is enveloped in love? Akwaeke Emezi’s brilliant novel, The Death of Vivek Oji, asks these essential kinds of questions and more.Įarly in the novel we are introduced to the tragedy that is its namesake. One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son’s body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet.
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