The Sound of Things to Come

by Emmanuel Iduma

Fiction. African & African American Studies. A young woman loses her grip on reality, destroyed by being the mistress of a powerful general. A pastor hides the innocent from marauding gangs hyped up by post- election fervor. A philosophy professor struggles against his better judgment to save everyone but himself. In present day Nigeria, there are many centers of the universe. Told from various points of view, THE SOUND OF THINGS TO COME departs from the strictures of linear narratives. Loosely centered on the activities of a church, the many colorfully drawn characters in Emmanuel Iduma's breakthrough novel illuminate the complex interconnectedness of a community where individuals struggle through their own painful dramas. First published in 2012 as Farad in Nigeria, Iduma's novel is the disruptive harbinger of Nigeria's rising generation of writers.

216 pages, Paperback

First published September 16, 2016

About the author

Emmanuel Iduma, born and raised in Nigeria, is a writer and art critic. He is the author of the novel The Sound of Things to Come and co-editor of Gambit: Newer African Writing. He has contributed essays on art and photography to a number of journals, magazines, and exhibition catalogues, including Guernica, ARTNews, ESOPUS, and The Trans-African, for which he works as managing editor. His interviews with photographers and writers have appeared in the Aperture blog, Wasafiri, and Africa is a Country. He co-founded and directs Saraba magazine.

Since 2011, he has worked with Invisible Borders, a trans-African organization based in Nigeria, and currently the director of publications. He played a major curatorial role in the group’s installation A Trans-African Worldspace at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

He was longlisted for the Kwani? Manuscript Prize in 2013. In 2015, he was writer-in-residence at the Danspace Project’s Platform in New York, L’appartement 22 in Rabat, and the Thread Residency in Sinthian, Senegal. In 2016, he was invited to contribute a travelogue for Carnegie International, 2018. A lawyer by training, he holds an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from the School of Visual Arts, New York, where he is also a faculty member.

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to The Mantle for the free copy of this book as part of a Goodreads Giveaway.

I found this book somewhat difficult to get through, and I'm still pondering how much of that is my own lack of familiarity with Nigerian literature and how much are shortcomings of the book. I have difficulty determining whether there's even a central plot as I would recognize it. I was confused as to how the various stories are intended to fit together.

The book is told from multiple perspectives, but it takes several chapters before there are any characters or events in common, so reading it can be disorienting. I'm not convinced that the voices of the narrators were differentiated enough--the dialogue was good and helped with characterization, but the internal thoughts seemed similar across the chapters. When the perspective changed, I liked seeing how Imuda revealed information for each new setting, but again, I'm not clear on how these stories fit together, what the sum of the parts is intended to be, or whether there was anything that necessitated this multiple-narrator technique in the first place.

Again, this may be a cultural gap. Perhaps Imuda is drawing on references or literary tropes that, as a reader in the United States, I'm not familiar with. There were definitely some cultural references I didn't understand, such as the location of cities and relationship between various ethnic groups. I did what I could to glean information from the text, but I constantly felt as though I was missing the bigger picture.

[World Literature Today]

"Style and thematic matrix create a sense of the uncanny. Terse but lyrical prose and often-cryptic dialogue suggest hidden depths. Woven throughout are fragments of a shared postmodern culture that brackets Dostoyevsky and Kate Chopin, Eliot and Mia Couto, Hollywood and Nollywood, Europop and hip-hop, email and Twitter, elliptical quotes, as from Tóibín’s The Story of the Night and Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon, and bits of songs that sign both angst and “a new dawn,” like Michael Bublé’s cover of “Feeling Good” and Colbie Caillat’s “The Little Things.” Together they convey alienation and the thirst for connection and meaning." - Michele Levy

This book was reviewed in the March/April 2017 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...

[Efemia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review To Come

[Kaitlyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of short stories. Interesting, thought provoking and imaginative.