Americanah in The Toast

Nov 13, 2013 Leann rated it it was amazing

Shelves: london, relationships, 21st-century, baltimore, religion, time, romance, america, africa, race

All of the important things about this book have already been said by others who write better than I do, so I'm going to say a few unimportant things. But I will note that this totally lives up to expectations.

1. Names - I was a bit bitter after reading Battle Royale last year, in which there were twenty-odd main characters and most of their names had the same repeating sounds and you couldn't tell any of them apart and it was really difficult to follow. I was frustrated that the Japanese names ...more

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Jan 09, 2015 LdyGray rated it really liked it

Shelves: book-club, 2015

This book is a beautifully written poem about race, culture, immigration, what it means to be a black person in America, and hair. Adichie brings such nuance to her characters. They are not two-dimensional placeholders for a commentary on race, but well-developed individuals who have opinions, right or wrong, who make mistakes, who struggle with their feelings and their identities. Adichie also challenged my complacency about my own privilege in a way that was both uncomfortable and hopeful.

Some This book is a beautifully written poem about race, culture, immigration, what it means to be a black person in America, and hair. Adichie brings such nuance to her characters. They are not two-dimensional placeholders for a commentary on race, but well-developed individuals who have opinions, right or wrong, who make mistakes, who struggle with their feelings and their identities. Adichie also challenged my complacency about my own privilege in a way that was both uncomfortable and hopeful.

Some favorite quotations:

"[...] he was sure that she, with a little more time and a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness. She had read many of them, because he recommended them, but they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue's memory."

I dated that guy. He really liked Bret Easton Ellis.

"[...] his mind had not changed at the same pace as his life, and he felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be." This is how I feel about becoming an adult. It's disorienting and confusing and I love how Adichie captures that. Later in the book she describes the same character as "hungry for choice and certainty."

Ifemelu, faced with her discontentment with a mostly-great relationship, says:

"There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach."

This is one of those places where Adichie's lyrical characterization moves beyond the superficial. I know that feeling well. Last time I felt it, I broke up with my mostly-great boyfriend (not the one who liked Ellis), quit my pretty-ok job, moved from Chicago to Boston, and listened to a lot of Dido.

"He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size."

...more

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Oct 09, 2014 Leslie rated it really liked it

Shelves: literary-fiction, general-new-fiction, women

Given the blurb on the back that calls "Americanah" a book about race and identity in the U.S., I didn't expect it to be so joyful, and was pleasantly surprised. I loved Ifemelu as a character and I loved the sometimes funny, sometimes biting observations on America and our "tribalisms." As someone who has lived, albeit for only a couple years, in a country that's very different from the U.S., I also really liked how Adichie embraced the ambiguities of homeland and diaspora, resisting the urge t ...more

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