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The Hindu
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dream Count is well worth the wait
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dream Count is an extraordinary, expansive novel; a reminder of why she is a literary star. Through the interlocking stories of four women in the U.S. — Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer; Zikora, her lawyer-friend; Kadiatou, her Guinean housekeeper; and Omelogor, her acerbic banker-cousin — Adichie writes about middle-age experiences, womanhood, class, and immigration. It is the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and Chiamaka or Chia begins to do what many of us did when our lives came to a forced standstill: overthink endlessly and count her many regrets. She starts to wonder: 'Where have all the years gone, and have I made the most of life?' Chia begins to scrutinise her past relationships with the wisdom of hindsight, which brings with it both remorse and reassurance wrapped in humour. She recounts her relationship with a pretentious man, introduced to her as 'the Denzel Washington of academia', who loved to say things like, 'It's a structural erase, a symbolic genocide, because if you're not seen, then you don't exist', over lunch. She thinks of the Igbo man who was perfect but boring and left her with an 'exquisite ache'. And then of a married Englishman — an ill-advised relationship doomed from the start. Chia's musings are made riveting by Adichie's assured and clever writing. And though there is no real plot line, Chia propels the novel forward. Story of grief While there is a lightness in Chia's reminiscing, there is a deep pain in Zikora's account. Compared to Chia's story, which spans years, Zikora's is more pointed. She, too, analyses the men in her life, calling them the 'thieves of time', but there is one particular thief she dwells on, who steals more than just her time and leaves her bewildered, angry, and distressed. Even as she navigates both the gift and tragedy in her life, Zikora's circumstances provide her an opportunity to reboot her relationship with her mother. Motherhood, in fact, is a strong theme in this novel, emerging once again in Kadiatou and Omelogor's stories. As Adichie writes in the author's note, Dream Count 'is really about losing my mother'. It is a grief that is 'still stubbornly in infancy', she says; the grief lingers in all the stories. Long before #MeToo The centrepiece of the novel is the account of the long-suffering Kadiatou; it is riven by grief and evokes outrage. Kadiatou hurtles from one tragedy to another, but remains marvellously determined to make something of her life until an incident in a hotel room shoves her into the public eye. Her character is based on Nafissatou Diallo, a West African woman working as a maid in a New York hotel, who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund, of sexual assault in 2011. Adichie's writing here is exquisite: the pages simmer with anger and also throb with a deep empathy and tenderness. Diallo's portrait in the media, sketched with cold facts and documents, stripped her of dignity and provided an 'ungenerous, undignified representation, incomplete and flattening', writes Adichie in the author's note. By humanising Kadiatou instead of victimising her, Adichie more than succeeds in returning Diallo's dignity. The last section belongs to Omelogor, Chia's closest cousin. She siphons funds from the corrupt bank where she works in Nigeria, into women's business ventures, calling the operation 'Robyn Hood'. In Adichie's world, even moral bankruptcy comes wrapped in some sort of strange feminism. The premise is catchy, and Omelogor the most grey character of them all, but her motivations for abruptly giving up everything and moving to the U.S. remain unconvincing. Lens on American society While Dream Count is primarily about the bonds of sisterhood and female desires, it carries many sharp — though sometimes reductive — observations on immigration. The women move to the U.S. in the hope of fulfilling their American Dream, but often find themselves perplexed by the ways of Americans and their language. Kadiatou observes that the U.S. is 'where the police shoot more than they run'. When Zikora is in labour, the nurse dictates, 'Bring your feet up and let your legs fall apart', while her mother tells her, 'Hold yourself together'. Adichie is also a staunch critic of cancel culture and takes on pugilistic progressives. One character dismisses Omelogor's success saying, 'Banking is inherently flawed'; elsewhere, Chia says, 'For Daneil's friends, everything was 'problematic', even the things of which they approved'. Dream Count is not a perfect novel — the feminism is so old-school that men are boring at best and abusers at worst. It also fizzles out towards the end. But Adichie is a master storyteller who simply dazzles and hypnotises with her satire, wit, and prose. And for that reason alone, this novel that was 10 years in the making is well worth the wait. radhika.s@ Dream Count Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Fourth Estate ₹599
Boston Globe
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Four women and the dreams that bind them
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Though she's an accomplished D.C. lawyer, Zikora has not been chosen for marriage. Seemingly luckless in love, her case worsens when her boyfriend Kwame abandons her upon learning that she's pregnant. Ashamed to be parenting without a husband, Zikora, embittered, hardens and her gaze (on men, those 'thieves of time,' and the world) turns jaundiced. Chiamaka watches her friend and wonders: 'When did Zikora take on this despair? From birth an unquestioned hand had written marriage into our life's plans, and for many women it became a time-bound dream, but when did she go from waiting to raging despair?' Advertisement Though Kadiatou is not despairing, she may be the novel's only character who deserves to be. With the exception of her daughter, Binta, Kadiatou's story is an extended tale of woe. Adichie has based this character on Advertisement Though Omelogor has never fallen for marriage myths or longed for idealized companionship, she does imagine motherhood and family life. Wealthy and well-connected in Abuja's finance and banking world, Omelogor has a talent for facilitating intricate financial schemes that enriches her boss and other Nigerian 'big men,' and funds her secret micro-grant program for village women running small businesses. Sexually free and intellectually curious, she doesn't suffer fools. When she learns from a lover that men turn to porn to learn about sex, she begins an advice blog called 'For Men Only' to steer men away from sourcing sex-ed in 'blue' films. Intent on becoming a scholar of pornography, Omelogor enters a cultural studies graduate program in the US. But instead of the freedom she craves, she finds herself sinking into a startling depression, the toxicity of grad school and American life poisoning her mind. Related : Throughout 'Dream Count' Adichie reminds readers that she's a massively talented prose stylist and storyteller, but she is especially strong in 'Chiamaka' and 'Omelogor,' where those characters narrate their experiences and measure their interior lives in the first person. There's power and promise in the novel's formal arrangement; 'Dream Count' could read as a 21st-century revision of Nina Simone's 'Four Women' or, better, a provocative pastiche of 'Four African Women' by the Rwandan-Ugandan-American singer-songwriter Advertisement Unfortunately, 'Dream Count' can't match the daring musicality of either jazz performer. One instance of trouble: Adichie's omniscient third person renderings of Zikora and Kadiatou flatten those characters rather than enlivening them. Though the sentences have momentum, the stories only run in place. Perhaps the novel's weaknesses stem from its referential quality. We have seen some of these Adichiean riffs run to much better effect in her best novels, ' (2013). 'Dream Count' also appears to dramatize the cultural criticism Adichie unfolds in her book-length essays, ' Chiamaka's litany of global lovers and Omelogor's digital commentary are reminiscent of the string of partners and the blog, 'Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black,' that Ifemelu, 'Americanah''s protagonist, maintains. That blog is a fascinating narrative device in 'Americanah,' allowing Adichie to develop the character through a 'historical' record of the character's thoughts about Africanness, American life, and Blackness. Omelogor's advice site is a kind of online finishing school for heterosexual men. But the posts do not advance the character's development. Instead, they offer Adichie space for threading her arguments about gender constructs and American provinciality into the fiction. Related : As Adichie argues in 'We Should All Be Feminists,' while human beings have evolved, 'our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.' Instead, we have taught girls and women that should they reach a certain age and remain unmarried, they ought to recognize this 'as a deep personal failure.' Advertisement Zikora struggles with this sense of 'deep personal failure.' Chiamaka's dream counting, her 'longing for what could have been,' addresses that failure from another angle. Omelogor offers a third angle of approach: escaping to the US, she searches for repair, re-enchantment, and the 'noble and good' part of herself. Though Adichie claims that gender 'prescribes how we should be' rather than freeing us to be 'our true individual selves,' none of the men who pass through the lives of these dreaming women become representations of human complexity. This is a disappointment because Adichie has a keen understanding of men and the skill to build strong versions of male experience. See, for example, Adichie's pitch perfect description of Obinze's wonder and trepidation in London and his shame upon deportation back to Nigeria in Part 3 of 'Americanah.' 'Dream Count' does not release its Nigerian characters from gender's strictures. These newly middle-aged, cosmopolitan, Nigerian women must face their ineffable grief. Writing in 'Notes on Grief," Adichie calls grief a cruel educator; it is an especially substantial, oppressive, and opaque thing . In Adichie's previous works, when her characters have faced the ineffable, they've frequently located narrow lanes to freedom, routes to refashioning themselves. Ironically, Kadiatou may be the only protagonist in 'Dream Count' to gain freedom enough to reinvent herself. DREAM COUNT By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Knopf, 416 pages, $32 Walton Muyumba teaches literature at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is the author of ' .' Advertisement
