There are many beautifully-wrought stories in the collection The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and every one of them rings with truth. Most of the stories left me wanting more, hoping for novels rising from the bones of the story, and answers to “what happens next?” Adichie is very good at creating quickly but with full depth of character, people that I care about, and putting them in viscerally-etched situations that are immediate and dire (whether of life or of spirit).  Although she can easily portray either sex and all ages and classes, she is at her very best in presenting women without wide choices but with the quiet strength to make the most of what is offered.  She celebrates the endurance of women circumscribed by tradition or poverty or custom who move beyond their defined places to find more for themselves and in themselves.  These women are able to bridge the Nigeria they are rooted in and the new world (either literally or figuratively) that they have found or made for themselves.

The exception to this is the first story, “Cell One”, which is not about a woman and her connections to Nigeria, but is instead about the country itself. It is a powerful but quietly stated history of modern Nigeria.  A young women witnesses the changes wrought in her own brother under a regime that is changing the entire country of Nigeria. The parallels between her brother and her country are understated but precise: the ability to manipulate, the perception of invulnerability and being above the rules of society, and the horror of realizing all that can be lost when society breaks down.  There is hope at the end of the story in the brother’s stand against cruelty, but there is also sadness, in the shadow that will from now on preside over him.

In “The Headstrong Historian”, Adichie combines a longer history of Nigeria with a truly compelling story of a maternal line that passes on strength and traditions between a grandmother and her granddaughter. Both are historians, the grandmother for her knowledge of the past and her understanding of how integrally past and present are connected, and the granddaughter for her understanding of the “clear link between education and dignity, between the hard, obvious things that are printed in books and the soft, subtle things that lodge themselves in the soul.”  It is a struggle between what the western male has deemed history-worthy of Africa, and what these two African women know is the full history of their place on the continent.  When Grace returns to Africa and reclaims the African name her grandmother gave her, it was a moment of pure joy in reading.

In “Jumping Monkey Hill”, that same contradiction between the western male view of what is interesting in African and the African’s experience is presented in the context of a writers workshop.  Adichie ‘s portray of the workshop is so acute and genuine that I felt queasy: the power of the organizer and his intention to use that power for sexual advantage; the awful judgments passed on works of the attending writers; and the attempts of the writers to assert themselves against the white and western hold of power in terms of agents and publishing and recognition. Again this story ended with a moment of pure reading joy, when a writer who is tired of being manipulated by the men in power in all aspects of her life (her father, her would-be employers, and now the organizer of the workshop), lands a bomb of truth in the midst of the posturing and falsity of the workshop.

In “Shivering”, a Nigerian woman cannot face the truth of her life until an erstwhile friend confronts her with the facts of her boyfriend’s behavior:  “Maybe it wasn’t love….Udenna did this to you and Udenna did that to you, but why did you let him?  Why did you let him?  Have you ever considered that it wasn’t love?“  That moment of recognition — that turning point in life when a person realizes that what was always thought to be true is not true — is present in every one of Adichie’s ‘ stories.  Revealing truth is not only a motif of Adichie’s stories but a characteristic of them.  The power of story-telling lies in its ability to convey a truth and Adichie’s stories are powerful indeed.