Chigozie Obioma’s Homerian Epic
The Man Booker finalist’s second book explores the transcontinental sacrifices made for love. It’s also an acute narrative about the indignities of traveling as an outsider.
Moments before setting the novel’s central journey into motion, the protagonist of An Orchestra of Minorities makes a simple declaration about the woman he loves. “I’m ready to do anything to marry her,” the beleaguered Nigerian poultry farmer Chinonso Solomon Olisa tells Jamike, an erstwhile childhood friend. It is an earnest mission statement, at once brave and straightforward. But the lovesick young man has no grasp of the terrors that await him on the path ahead.
The second novel from the Man Booker Prize finalist Chigozie Obioma, is a wrenching study of the sacrifices made for love. The arc of the chicken farmer’s attachment to the pharmacist-in-training Ndali Obialor begins not with a first date, but with near-tragedy, when Chinonso
