If you are waiting for the "American Woman" to repeat the once beloved "Half of the Yellow Sun", then immediately reject idle hopes, this is a story about something completely different, although both the love line and Nigeria as a place of action will naturally be present in the text.
The central heroine of the novel was a Nigerian Ifemelu, who left her native country on the eve of another military coup and went to study in the United States. According to an oral agreement, her lover Obinze was supposed to join her after a while, but life made its own adjustments to their plans. After 13 years of living in America, Ifemelu decides to return to his homeland...
In the "American", the one already familiar to the Russian-speaking reader Adichie is easily recognized, there is no need to conduct a linguistic examination to say with confidence that "Half ..." and this novel is written by the same person, but nevertheless the style changes on the face.
Irony sometimes flows over the edge, the heroine, who is a blogger in the plot, and then a journalist, knows how to find the funny in the sad, notice and very interestingly describe the realities that she, as a "black non-American", faces almost daily.
Actually, one of the key themes of the work is just the clash within the framework of "democratic America" of people not only of different races (in fact, serious scientists say that races do not exist, so I will make a reservation about the conventionality of this term), but also of different origins, and therefore of different ways of thinking.
I think everyone knows about the conflict between the colored and white population of the states, but the fact that there is also a hierarchy among both the white and colored population, and the Africans who moved to the United States are at the very bottom of this complex racial-class system, it was interesting to read, especially since a very intelligent girl, not a stereotypical mannered black girl, acted as an all-seeing BB in this case.
The main idea of "Americana" is easily conveyed with the help of the well-known saying "a girl can leave the village, but a village from a girl - never", only instead of the word "village" you need to substitute the word "Africa" and slightly change the meaning of the phrase: it is no longer about the fact that it is impossible to completely adjust habits and manners to the generally accepted ones, but about the inability to pull out of yourself all that made you yourself.
And of course, this phrase-formula is universal, because instead of a village and Africa, you can substitute any other place on the world map, even Siberia, even the Urals. We become who we are in certain conditions, against a certain background, we are bound to them forever, and yes, sometimes I want to run away, but there is never a guarantee that by running away we will not begin to suffer from love for what we left.
Ifemelu, as the heroine of such a story, is good because she has traveled a thirteen-year path from the very bottom, when there is nothing to eat and you can't find a job for months, to a self-sufficient woman who is able to buy an apartment for herself and talk on equal terms with university teachers with degrees, her life has really developed by the standards of the majority.
She is one of those who can look down on her compatriots, but still more than anything else in the world wants to communicate with them on an equal footing, without seeing fawning and fawning, without being forced to justify herself or meet someone's expectations.
At the junction of the collision of two cultures, American and Nigerian, the one that is colloquially called "American" is gradually born: she braids her pigtails instead of straightening her hair, but at the same time gradually fuses deeper with a once strange and incomprehensible culture.
It is in this search for the "American woman" that Ifemelu has been all her life, which she remembers in a few hours of braiding in the salon, and we read 600 book pages. And if reading this text it seems to you that a Russian person and a Nigerian emigrant have no points of contact and reading a novel is worth it solely for the sake of learning a different culture, then I dare to dissuade you: well, who among us was not in search of himself, was not faced with the choice of "personal principles or benefits".
Have you ever thought about where to run for a better life or joining a new environment (or at least a working team), have you ever wondered about how strange and bizarre everything is arranged in it, who has not encountered a person whose views on something important are directly opposite, who has not defended the right to be yourself and say what you want, and not usually put in a certain situation?
Well, absolutely nothing of what is being discussed in the "American" does not make the reader think about how Nigerians or some African realities differ from ours, whether globalization is to blame or the fact that some things are in principle universal for all inhabitants of the planet, I do not know, but I can say for sure that for me personally, after reading the Nigerian novel, a touch of something exotic has finally disappeared from this country.
Since the action of "The Americans" takes place in the 1990s-2000s, then the political background corresponds to this era, but if in "Half of the Yellow Sun" the revolution and the war were simply inseparable from the plot, then in this case much less attention is paid to politics and, perhaps, the most interesting fragments on this topic are the blog posts inserted into the text of the novel, dedicated to Ifemelu...
Barack Obama (at that time only a presidential candidate). The hopes of the entire dark-skinned world associated with the first non-white president of the United States, read after the situation in the White House changed in the opposite direction, add new meanings to this novel and make it a little sadder than the author assumed at the time of writing.
It seems that at the moment such texts as "The American Woman", with her belief in a bright future, are no longer possible, they look like children's fairy tales, and they are replaced by such things as "The Corrupt Creature" by Paul Batey. And it was only now that I noticed how diligently Obama avoided everything related to race for both terms, although it was precisely progress in this area that was expected of him.
342.165 SRY