Onyeka Nwelue was born in 1988 in Nigeria. He has contributed reviews to Farafina magazine and other publications. His writings have appeared in The Sun, Wild Goose Poetry Review, Kafla Inter-Continental and The Guardian. He is the editor of Film Afrique, a primer on African film initiatives, he manages Blues and Hills Consultancy and is currently studying film making and directing. He was nominated as artist of the year for The 2009 Future Awards. The Abyssinian Boy is his first novel. He tells us about his favourite five books!
The God of Small Things is the only book I’ve read more than fifty times. It is easy to call me a mad man or say that I am lying, but take my word. I’ve bought countless copies of this masterpiece and I have continued to stare at the arrangement of words, the construction of sentence, the structure of the novel and the cultural landscape of the book. It won the Booker Prize in 1997 and since then, Roy hasn’t written another novel. It will be hard to write another book, anyway, if I had written this. It is absolute beauty and symbolizes real talent. One of the most clever things Roy did with this book is the use of language to create an impression that will last forever on the reader. I once joked on my Facebook that anyone who hasn’t read The God of Small Things should bury his head in shame and I was attacked. Yet, I meant every word I said then, I still do.
The first time I travelled to India, I landed in Mumbai. It is a bustling city, very peopled and has an amazing nightlife. Here, Midnight’s Children is set in Bombay, which is the old name of Mumbai and it is just like the city. There are so many things happening in the book. There are too many people. There are too many real life incidents, factually fictionalized and so many languages getting fused with another; there is an invention of a language called Hinglish. I don’t know what the plot of the book is; many readers always want to know. What I know is that I was transported into another realm, into another country, by the mere beautiful power of the pen and imagination. If there is any novel that would rival The God of Small Things in the history of Indian writing in English, it should be this beautiful Book of History. It is about everything hidden under the sun.
I bought this book in a local bookshop in Delhi. And as soon as I started reading it, it transported me back to Nigeria. Thoughts raced through my head. This was not the Nigeria I knew, yet, I felt I knew it. It was so familiar to me. Some amazing sense of humour. It was a disturbing book, in the sense that I kept trying to imagine things happening in Nigeria just like they are happening in the book. Just like the two previous books, there are many characters and this is the sort of writing that gives me joy. I am still hoping that one day, I will meet Ben Okri and look him in the eyes.
A Strange and Sublime Address by Amit Chaudhuri
Amit Chaudhuri’s novels are always slim in volume. They look like books of poetry. By the time you are able to buy and start reading them, you will realize that the beauty of any great book is in its story. He is a writer who understands his environment and takes absolute advantage of it, by describing it very vividly. If any reader leaves pages of his books without visiting Calcutta, then that reader didn’t read the book. For the most part, A Strange and Sublime Address did the work Lonely Planet couldn’t do for me. It transported me to India, taught me Bengali language, tradition and culture and I was drenched by the monsoon rains and ate mangoes on the streets of India. It is just a beautiful book, filled with beautiful humour.
Few years ago, I read a book about a guy who is married and has a daughter. He has a secret: he loves men. He is Nigerian. So, he has to hide that fact from people so they won’t kill him. He tells that to a South African woman who tells someone, because she doesn’t feel there is anything wrong in it. It is the first book I loved that focuses on just one person, although many people would say the book also centres on the wife. Through the lush literary landscape created by Jude Dibia in this amazing debut, I swept through the horrors Adrian faces, seeking acceptance, quietly looking for a saviour. It is one book which appeals to the heart and to the head and gives you goose-bumps, because Dibia makes reality a fiction by just playing on the consciousness of the characters. One book that should be read by anyone who understands what it means to be a human being.
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