An Orchestra of Minorities
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By Chigozie Obioma
avg rating
3 reviews
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Umuahia, Nigeria.
Chinonso, a young poultry farmer, sees a woman attempting to jump to her death from a highway bridge.
Horrified by her recklessness, Chinonso joins her on the roadside and hurls two of his most prized chickens into the water below to demonstrate the severity of the fall.
The woman, Ndali, is moved by his sacrifice. Bonded by this strange night on the bridge, Chinonso and Ndali fall in love.
But Ndali is from a wealthy family, and when they officially object to the union because he is uneducated, Chinonso sells most of his possessions to attend a small college in Cyprus.
Once in Cyprus, he discovers that all is not what it seems.
Furious at a world which continues to relegate him to the sidelines, Chinonso gets further and further away from his dream, from Ndali and the place he called home. In this contemporary twist of Homer’s Odyssey, in the mythic style of the Igbo literary tradition, Chigozie Obioma weaves a heart-wrenching epic about the tension between destiny and determination.
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Reviews
Maleeha: I’ve never read a book like this before. Obioma’s powerful use of language and his pacy narrative propels the reader through the realities of human fragility with a wonderous depth. He masterfully illustrates the most consuming and compelling emotion of all – love.
This book is complicated. It's a unique perspective, having the book narrated by the main character. But it made the book very dense and wordy, which started out interesting and then got really tiresome. I'll admit, I was skim reading towards the end just because I wanted to get through it. I also felt the female character of 'Ndali' wasn't well portrayed. I didn't believe she was truly in love with Chinoso because her character came across rather flat. It also creeped me out that Chinoso kept calling Ndali "mommy." What? No. Just no.
A very different prospective seeing the main character in the book through his spirits eyes. The author has a good writing style but I found the storyline a bit slow - too much focus on details like feeding the chickens.
It gave me an insight into a country I don't know much about
