Graceland, Chris Abani
321 pages, @2005
Graceland, was my friend Shion’s, book group pick for the month of February. We had actually seen Mr. Abani speak at the event we attended a couple of years back honoring the 50th Anniversary of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Of course, it is always exciting when you get to read a book by someone who you’ve seen speak.
Graceland follows the story of Elvis Oke in a coming-of-age tail that takes place in Lagos, Nigeria. Elvis, likes to dance and imitate his namesake, Elvis Presley (although that doesn’t play as centrally into the book as you might be lead to believe by the back cover and other reviews). The book goes back and froth between two different time periods, Elvis’ life as an child, innocent to what was going on around him, and Elvis’ life as a teenager in the Lagos ghetto where he lives with his disapproving father. The book does a good job of showing how an innocent child with so much potential put in all the wrong circumstances with the wrong parenting can end up making decisions that take him down a road no one should be traveling on.
Overall, I was fascinated by the story of Elvis Oke. Africa is not a region of the world that I read much about in the fiction or non-fiction reading that I do. This is one of the reasons I love book group, because it forces me sometimes to leave my “reading comfort zone” and tackle a subject I’m less familiar or comfortable with. This book certainly accomplished that.
I found that some of the vehicles Abani used to put the story together didn’t achieve in my mind what they were meant to. At the end of every chapter there was one page dedicated to a recipe from Elvis’ mother’s journal, mostly featuring yams, or the description of a root, where to find it, what it looked like, and what it’s healing powers were. I found these pages ultimately distracting. I’m not going to cook any of the recipes and I am certainly not going to go root hunting. I found that when I wanted to continue on with Elvis’ story I was forced to stop and read a page that I felt added nothing to the book. This grew frustrating as I delved deeper and deeper into the novel. In addition, at the start of each chapter there was a little history of the kola nut ceremony, a coming of age ceremony for men in certain African tribes. I wish rather than including a sentence or two at the top of each chapter that the entire ceremony had been cited and explained all at once. Reading about it in bits and pieces made it less powerful in my opinion because I couldn’t put it all together. I’m sure there was a purpose to this but I couldn’t see it.
The story itself is powerful and I’m glad I read it. Overall I would give this novel 3 stars.
Post in Comments:
What is your favorite novel that takes place in Africa?
