Many of us
during the pandemic thought about death and how quietly it goes around nursing homes and IVA wards.
Who held the breath of those who died in solitude.
Last words that could not be answered, visors and screens in layers upon layers between people, a death in a picture, facetimead.
So Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's thin little "Notes on grief" (translated by Nicklas Whale), about her father's death last summer, comes at the right time.
Perhaps not only another contribution to the grief genre, with highlights such as Roland Barthe's posthumous "Diary of Grief", about his mother's death, but also about the specialness of losing someone in a contemporary pandemic that cuts off human contact.
The unreality of grief reinforced.
Admittedly, the author's
large successful family is already scattered around the world, as it always has been, and she's obviously talking about her "American home" because she has several, but now zoom is the only vessel to reach each other.
When the seemingly healthy 88-year-old father dies suddenly, it is a small consolation that the panic about being trapped on the other side of the earth does not last long.
But the mother who has become a widow remains, and the funeral and the rituals and the body of the mortuary, whose staff have to be bribed week by week waiting for Nigeria to open the airports. It increases the grief's feeling of confinement and exile, which gives the text its character of being written in anticipation.
But it is a thin book in every sense
. The text was published last fall in The New Yorker, and did better in the magazine's higher pace, where it became a quick-sketched glade. Like Ngozi Adichie's earlier pamphlet-like essays "Everyone Should Be a Feminist" and "Letter to a New Parent", this is something other than the literature she is powerful at. What is missing here is what built the story's style in short stories in "That which almost suffocates you" or novels like "Americanah": the elusive duality that reveals death-threatening power structures, the sharp images.
Here, instead, are pretty simple thoughts about grief.
It becomes strangely abstract, despite recreated details of a long and rich life, and a daughter's memories of a beloved father at the center of it all.
No half yellow sun, dad is always the light.
Maybe it's about the privileged existence (nannies, drivers, dad's briefcases everywhere, including all the staff in the home) that somehow makes it too tame, about the loving family that gives a perfect light that does not engage.
Dad was wonderful
, echoes the text, but it is at its best when it approaches the difficult to handle, like the anger against the homeland of Nigeria.
Or when Ngozi Adichie writes about the bitter and unbearable relief that the dreaded is suddenly realized, and the rage it can arouse.
"Enemies, beware: the worst has happened. My dad's gone. Now my madness will show. ” It's the book held no madness. But there is a whole authorship to explore as a consolation.