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An Orchestra of Minorities
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Kelly_Hunsaker_reads
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Sep 23, 2019 03:44PM
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A heart-breaking and mythic 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.
A contemporary twist on the Odyssey, An Orchestra of Minorities is narrated by the chi, or spirit of a young poultry farmer named Chinonso. His life is set off course when he sees a woman who is about to jump off a bridge. Horrified by her recklessness, he hurls two of his prized chickens off the bridge. The woman, Ndali, is stopped in her tracks.
Chinonso and Ndali fall in love but she is from an educated and wealthy family. When her family objects to the union on the grounds that he is not her social equal, he sells most of his possessions to attend college in Cyprus. But when he arrives in Cyprus, he discovers that he has been utterly duped by the young Nigerian who has made the arrangements for him. Penniless, homeless, we watch as he gets further and further away from his dream and from home.
An Orchestra of Minorities is a heart-wrenching epic about destiny and determination.
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Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) is a Nigerian writer and assistant professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has been called, in a New York Times book review, "the heir to Chinua Achebe." In 2015, Obioma was named one of "100 Global Thinkers" by Foreign Policy magazine. He is best known for writing the novels The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), both of which have been shortlisted for the Booker prize in their respective years of publication.
Of Igbo descent, Obioma was born into a family of 12 children — seven brothers and four sisters – in Akure, in the southwestern part of Nigeria, where he grew up speaking Yoruba, Igbo, and English. As a child, he was fascinated by Greek myths and the British masters, including Shakespeare, John Milton, and John Bunyan. Among African writers, he developed a strong affinity for Wole Soyinka's The Trials of Brother Jero; Cyprian Ekwensi's An African Night's Entertainment; Camara Laye's The African Child; and D. O. Fagunwa's Ògbójú Ọdẹ nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀, which he read in its original Yoruba version. Obioma cites his seminal influences as The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola, for its breadth of imagination; Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, for its enduring grace and heart; The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, both for the power of their prose; and Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe, for its firmness in Igbo culture and philosophy
A friend is reading this now and says it is amazing. I can not wait
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I'm so glad Celia. I like seeing your thoughts on books we both read.
I’m nearly at the end of the first part of this book and, if I’m honest, I’m finding it a slow and slightly sluggish read. I think the level of detail is perhaps too great for my tastes, although there is some striking imagery. I will keep going.
I’ve finished this book now and am so glad I persevered with it. I gradually got into the rhythm and some of the writing is so vivid. 4 stars
Here’s my review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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4 stars
Here’s my review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/..."
I'm so glad you said this, because I am going to try again. I had started and stopped.
I am about half way through this book now. I agree with Clare that it is slow going but still something keeps pulling me onward. The Igo belief structure is one of the pulls but also the balance of male/female interpretations of what makes for a good future.
I have finished The Orchestra of Minorities and I am glad I persevered. Although I never came to connect with “the host”, our main character, who was a broken man who became even more broken as the story unfolded, I did appreciate the introduction to Igbo belief systems and to Nigerian culture. I thought the author did a good job of making me feel in the minority when he was not using the White Man’s language. I also appreciated the narrator, our host’s “chi” and his reflections on human nature. Although I understood this to be a retelling of the Odyssey through a Nigerian perspective, I never found the host to be heroic in thought or action. The gods were not playing with him, but rather he was living out his destiny, his fate. He was born to suffer and to make other’s suffer. Ultimately it was a very depressing tale.
