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Book review. Chigozie Obioma is working with a magnificent språkblandning

the Hawk has taken a chicken in hönsgården and fågelskocken gives suddenly a strange synchronized sound, like a crying begravningsvisa over the lost. Egwu umu-o

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Book review. Chigozie Obioma is working with a magnificent språkblandning

the Hawk has taken a chicken in hönsgården and fågelskocken gives suddenly a strange synchronized sound, like a crying begravningsvisa over the lost. Egwu umu-obere-ihe is called the igbospråket, a ”minoritetsorkester”. And Chigozie Obiomas new novel is really full of poultry. It kacklas and flaxas around our protagonist Chinonso, fågelherde in the early 2000's Nigeria – from the fateful history of childhood gosling to the English language and communication breakdowns, which he approaches ”as a happy a collection of hens and chickens, unable to determine how or who it should attack”. A night sacrificing his two birds to rescue a distraught woman on a bridge, and life will never be different.

If Obiomas acclaimed debut novel, the Bookerprisnominerade ”Fiskarmännen”, was moving in a post-colonial universe of the poisoned family relations, examines the ”Minoritetsorkestern” rather than the romantic love the essence, with migration as a political fund. Soon developed, therefore, a pounding history between our Chinonso and the woman on the bridge – the sophisticated apotekarstudenten Ndali.

But a simple hönsfarmare shall not intermarry with the well-educated middle class, it can get vådliga consequences. The picture of the girlfriend is at the same time both vague and complex, written out of a mind distorted by passion. And how is a man's love is really like if it can coexist with a sense of shame in the face of the beloved smelly jacket, his ”bushmanlighet” and lack of refinement?

tunnel vision sells Chinonso everything to take a university course in Cyprus, delivered what should turn out to be a so-called ”yahoopojke”, which set this type of tests in the system. In Nigeria, say the fathers of the migration to ”when a man crossing the border into an unknown land, he becomes a child again” – and once on the divided mediterranean island are very really nothing, except the unpaid tuition fees and the white people who want to touch even the hair.

A deadly chain of events set in motion, whose details shall not be revealed here – despite the fact that this worldly plot is not really the novel's true core. It consists instead of a live cabinet out of the igbofolkets religious imagination, where our Chinonsos protective spirit is the one that leads the reader forward.

the Whole story so takes the form of a testimony to a divine council, which takes a utifrånblick on the man and his strange ways: ”Akataka, it is a common phenomenon among people to try to reverse the order: try to get it back that has moved forward. But it fails, always, always. I have seen it many times,” says the spirit, and opens up vast periods of time.

an elaborate and magnificent språkblandning, where the untranslated phrases in igbo woven into the dialogue as a mysterious, shimmering thread: ”'Obim, igho take go?' she said, and with his face entrenched in the valley between the smiling and the weeping, leaned her head to the side.” The English reader may therefore find themselves in to experience this story with an eye to the patchy obstructed, in the same way as the constant references to the spiritual world casts shadows over the text for the uninitiated. A flowing metaforik at the same time creates a rich and embracing prose, where the father developed through the countryside ”which, from a deep cuts” and Chinonso transformed into a ”contrast live animals” whose tail extends into the past when he sells the farm and they loved the hens.

Compared to the debut is ”Minoritetsorkestern” more stylized, and has a more elevated appropriations. The grip to let the protagonist's spirit to lead the story is extraordinary in the most positive sense of the word, but it also creates a certain distance to the jinx Chinonso and his cruel fate. On good and evil it is as Obioma created here a kind of epic primeval story as it soars through time and space, high above the man and her complaining song.

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