BOOK REVIEW | The Death of Vivek Oji
RATING: 4/5
AUTHOR: Akwaeke Emezi
ISBN: 0525541608
ISBN13: 9780525541608
PUBLISHER: Riverhead Books
RELEASE DATE: August 4th, 2020
PAGES, 248
EDITION LANGUAGE: English
SETTINGS: Nigeria
I read this book for the BookTube Prize of 2021, Octafinals Fiction group C.
Vivek Oji died, the body was dropped at the front door. Naked, brutal, deadly dead. How, when, and who did it? Those questions tortured Vivek’s mom Kavita and the rest of the family.
The book has two main narrations, Osita, Vivek’s cousin, in first-person narration, and a third-person narration mostly following Kavita, Vivek’s mother, and the older generations in their family.
I loved the story. The pacing after the first one-third of the book was perfect. Instead of getting to know more about Vivek, we spent more time with people around Vivek (which makes sense because Vivek is dead) and saw how they evolved over the years. The author presented strong emotions in the book, mainly grief and guilt. They carved into small details of captivating writings and sunk you into the feelings.
Vivek and all the children in the book were the children of “Nigerwives”. The concept of “Nigerwives” was very interesting to me. They are foreign-born women who married Nigerian men. A lot of things they need to adapt since they usually have a different cultural background than Nigerian men. The tension and the cultural conflict between the husbands and the Nigerwives were very interesting. My curiosity about them was a double edge sword. I don’t think the book explored enough of the culture around them. I kept wanting to read more about the dynamic between them, but couldn’t get fulfilled.
However, I wasn’t a big fan of the pacing of the book at the beginning. The novel was not long but the start still felt quite slow to me. It was written in a format of describing photos of pieces of memories, but the format didn’t follow up in the rest of the book, and it makes all the build-ups feel a little bit lost. With a lot of stories and the rendering of nostalgia about the older generations in their family, you’d think it has something to do with Vivek’s death. But the connection was not strong enough to support the atmosphere and the foreshadowing the author created. And the mystery of how Vivek died was easy to figure out, led to some dissatisfaction of mine.
But overall, it’s an enjoyable reading it’s a stunning story set in Nigeria and with a light mystery but heavy conflicts and reconciliation.