I bought this book based on the feedback from my friend Sharon and the somewhat offbeat review from my new friend, NaughtiLiterati. I'm glad I listened to their advice, because Voice of America was one of the most refreshing books I've read in months. I have no idea how to describe it though.
Starting with my first impression: the writing is stellar. I'm ashamed to say I don't know much about E. C. Osondu, except that he is Nigerian born and that he puts most American born writers to shame. After I got over my amazement with a foreign born writer's English skills, I realized that I had found a rare treasure: an author with a gift for writing short stories. (Can you hear the trumpets blow and see the clouds part as the treasure is revealed?)
I think most of us are lazy readers. We've been conditioned by contemporary fiction, with it's cookie-cutter beginning, middle, and end--and hopefully some interesting complications to the story's conflict along the way. Most of us aren't comfortable reading short stories though, because they don't follow this pattern. A short story is a risky casual encounter. It's just a glimpse into a scene. And if you're lucky, the short story engages you enough to take you for a ride.
What I love about good short stories is that they end with no warning. Great short stories take you on the ride of your life and then kick you to the curb, naked and shivering without so much as cab fare or a quarter for a phone call. The weirdest thing is that you wave a nervous wave and say "thanks" with a foolish grin as the short story speeds away. And you kind of hope you get a chance for another night's adventure after you've slept this one off.
So what about E. C. Osondu's stories? His stories certainly provide some interesting rides. Despite the book's title, his stories start far away in Lagos, Nigeria. (I had to start with a map to see where that was.) His stories start off in primitive settings where he describes life in refugee camps. Each short story hops from locale to locale, but the settings become less rural as he moves on to describe city life in Nigeria and then hops to America as the next story's protagonist is a foreign visitor or later an immigrant. Other hops take you to petroleum drilling towns where the twist is that the Americans are the guest workers. It's confusing and dizzying, but that's OK.
As NaughtiLiterati pointed out in her review, Osundu also uses humorous local proverbs to punctuate the book: "...like the proverbial cow without a tail, which was said to be at the mercy of all manner of flies."
I didn't see this book as a book of humor and I didn't see the other extreme either: he didn't tell us that life stinks because there's no joy in a third world culture. I saw something in the middle, where the stories showed how tough life can be, but that joy can be found anywhere--even in the most horrible settings.
I'm glad I read Voice of America, I'm grateful for the virtual trip abroad, and I appreciate the chance to look back at my own country through Osundu's Nigerian eyes.
I'm going to go rest up now. And hopefully I can find someone as skilled as Osundu to take me on another trip like this.
EDIT: I almost forgot to mention one thing that wasn't completely "stellar" about the version of the book that I read. I read this on my Kindle, and the Kindle formatting was kind of a mess. Words and lines broke at odd places and in other places words were run together. It took a bit of mental acrobatics to figure out what was going on in some spots. I would normally subtract a star and make a bigger deal out of this, but the quality of this book was too good to let bad post-production work detract from my overall impression.
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About the author
A glimpse into Nigerian life and culture; so foreign yet so familiar
I just finished E. C. Osondu's book of short stories. After each brief story I felt I had to put the book down and reflect on what I'd just read. The themes are so foreign (to an American reader) and yet so universally familiar and powerful. This is a book of hope, desperation, tragedy, culture, loss, and brutal honesty. I was captivated by his beautiful, straightforward writing style.
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2011
