Tade Thompson is a person with Yoruba heritage, living in London. I may have gotten points from my Nigerian neighbor for reading a novel set in Nigeria. I don't think my friend is Yoruba though.
The novel is competent. The narrator is interesting and the others around him are interesting. The plot skips around time. Is that more interesting? Nobody writes a linear story any more.
I love learning culture, and I hope I'm getting some cultural knowledge about Nigeria and Yoruba culture. Culture is funny because a stereotype has information, it's just not that rigid, and doesn't really tell me how tightly people cling to those stereotypes. A person from that culture hopefully provides neutral information with some negatives and some positives. When I was a social worker everything was culture culture culture, and I miss that. I ask people at the park, but it turns out it's not easy to talk about for most people. Culture is something hidden in the background, like Kamala Harris being a woman vice president in a fairly patriarchal structure. She can be as matriarchal as she wants to be, but the structures around her subtly push her in other directions.
The world building includes mind reading and health fixing nanites, a benevolent alien presence on earth, where they create structures that give out these health fixing nanites once a year, and provide power, I think. There are some strange creatures, but there aren't a whole lot of aliens. Like they tried some interventions to hopefully help out and maybe hopefully evolve the society.
I say I was pretty engaged throughout the whole novel. At times the time jumping around was confusing but I would maybe catch up in the action. I can never distinguish whether it's bad writing when I don't like something that happens in a novel. Sometimes I'm not in the mood to have the dark side uncovered, or I dread that, and maybe that makes me take a break from the novel for a while, take longer to pick it back up.
My cousin felt the book was "overstuffed". Too much, not enough contrasts or a lull maybe. I love it when Jake goes off to fish in The Sun Also Rises. Since the book is about reading minds, I'm not sure if it feels overstuffed for me. I like relationships and how minds work, I'm swimming in what I'm most interested in. The narrator is a slick thief who works for the government, realizes he has done a lot of harm by his misconduct, and tries to raise to the occasion.
My cousin is a twin. On p. 236 of my copy of Rosewater, Thompson says the Yoruba see twins as mystical. The younger one is called Kehinde. Should I start calling my younger twin cousin Kehinde? I think I'll have to try at least once. He said he once had a taxi driver name Kehinde. He's the older one, so he couldn't bond with a fellow Kehinde.
At one point he goes to hear the thoughts of people in palliative care, terminal. That reminds me of when I heard about the thought experiment: what would you like people to say about you at your funeral.
In the end the novel fizzled out, but I guess it's a trilogy, so it's just getting started. A good ending would motivate me to read further in.
Links:
Bata dancers from the Nigerian Yoruba tribe
Music
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