Graceland: book review

I've been out of commission for the last two days. Food poisoning.

In that time, I've managed to finish Chris Abani's Graceland. In a word, this novel is tripe. Nay, worse than tripe--one can eat tripe for sustenance--this is balderdash, hogwash, baloney, codswallop, stuff and nonsense. How this thing got published is entirely beyond my comprehension.

Some of the good things: the descriptors are wonderful, Abani's sense for a describing a scene is actually pretty good. Reading, one is indeed transported as an observer to the circumstance on detail. I was also able to steal some recipes from the the chapter heading pages which I will be cooking, if I can ever find the ingredients. Yes, recipes. In a novel.

Apart from these few gems in a field of pig feces, the novel is an unpalatable amalgamation of every Nigerian story ever told, including folk tales, Things Fall Apart, and every other dime-store piece-of-shit story I read from native novels as a boy living in Benin City. It's like Abani took a six-course meal, from soup to nuts, tossed them in a blender and produced a vile, simmering, vomit-inducive broth. This is a scattered, haphazard work that doesn't know what story it wants to tell exactly.

Most unforgiveable, it's completely inplausible: a 16-year-old Elvis impersonator (in the novel, he impersonates Elvis exactly once) who at various times during the course of the book reads (and understands) Greek tragedies, devours the Black American epic novels of Baldwin, reads Rilke and the Qu'ran; who is involved in human --and human body-parts--trafficking, manages to intelligently discuss Capitalism and various obscure theories of Economics, critiques Philosophy, is given a hand-job by his aunt, learns to dance the Waltz, witnesses a relative's death a la Okonkwo in Things, and rather fantastically, his father "turns" into a Leopard; he has a grandmother who speaks with a Scottish accent, is himself the target of a military inquiry and obligatory torture session, and then (phew!) finally escapes to America on a borrowed passport.

If the above sounds chaotic, it doesn't hold a candle to the vertigo-inducing book! This is a story of one boy, but it could easily be the story of 20 people. 20 insane people. But here's the rub: in spite of all the chaos, it's unbearably predictable. I knew The King would find The Colonel to be the one who killed his family. I knew Redemption's passport would be passed on to Elvis. And those ridiculous names!

Utter swill. Or maybe it's my food poisoning.