The Thing Around Your Neck

Powerful and very human stories though several while interesting are less plausible.Great craftsmanship in the structure of the stories and the developemnt of characters. It is not a flattering picture of post-colonial Africa.

The Thing Around Your Neck is a short story collection and each title is brilliantly picked, though one never imagines what each story is about. Chimamanda plots her stories most carefully, in just a few pages tells the story of two or more characters, revealing their innermost and complex feelings. In spite of the poetry of her prose, it's fluent, fluid and easy to read. And there's an openness and balance in her narrative that enlightens our perspective, not only of African or Nigerian reality, but of human nature as a whole. One can feel the freshness of her youth but there's wisdom of centuries in her heart. Chimamanda is definitely a MUST read!

I couldn't put this down. This is a collection of stories that are so dramatic and interesting that it kept me riveted. Loved it and highly recommend it, especially for those interested in different cultures.

I am a huge Adichie fan, and I completely adore this book. Even though the stories highlight a series of issues faced by African (Nigerian) women, I strongly feel that any WoC can relate to the societal and familial expectations, feminism, misogyny, career, education, assimilation, violence, relationships etcetera in the stories.

I loved it. The only thing I wish is that some of the stories were longer or perhaps novels because I really missed and wondered about the characters. I guess that's the draw back of short stories but still really enjoyed reading it.

I became thoroughly immersed in this collection of stories. All of them focus on people and events in Nigeria (or in one case, Biafra) or on Nigerian people who have emigrated to the United States. It's beautifully written and involving. The stories take a variety of points of view, and bring the reader to sometimes surprising places. I very much recommend this book.

Chimamanda Adiche tells a story well and with a clear eye. Her understanding of the human condition and of the impact of poverty on Nigeria and its people is enlightening. I avidly read anything she writes.

It is a collection of short stories so I can't really give too much general information on it. It was interesting. I love this author so I've read a few of her books. Mostly because of it's format, this is not my favorite. I would recommend "Half a Yellow Sun" and my new favorite "Americana". I love them both.

Compared to alot of Adichie's books.I wasnt particulary captured by this book.Living in the UK and an African writer I am very interested in African/Western cultural conflict.I dont think she gets the balance right in some of the stories compared to Half Of A Yellow Sun.Some of the messages in some stories get lost in the style of presentation and can be very confusing to non African readers.

It is a good short story format never the less.

If you enjoy reading stories that presents you with strong characters, full of emotions and clever dialogues, Chimamanda will please you. If you enjoy reading so that you can grasp some of social-context of a place or people, you'll have it in this short stories as well. Chimamanda's great writing skills delivery us a insightful overviews of the conflicts of different socioeconomic classes in Nigeria and their lives as expats in USA as the same time she doesn't lack the opportunity to create individuals men and women who make the lines worth reading even if you care about only for the fiction.

I was required to read this book for a class I am taking about the subject of Women African and African-Americans writers and I never expected it to be this phenomenal. It is made up of short stories and they are all just riveting. The details, the stories of redemption, the stories of identities lost and found, the stories of loss and tragedy. They are all spectacular, the store guidelines ask who I should recommend this book to. My answer? Everyone

Some of the stories were interesting and some were just not clear at all. My favorite is ''The Robbery." For some reason, I Just laughed all through because of the way Chimamanda described the tales.
It was worth it.

What a fabulous writer! Even though you may have read one of these stories earlier (perhaps in Granta or The New Yorker), you will definitely want to read them again and again -- each one is a perfect jewel.

The product came in good time and I have value for my money. Even though the edges came a bit rough but the pages were not affected. Of course I bought it as used. I wasnt expecting a perfect product. I love it.

She is one of the best authors that I ever read. Her story is very subtle but also so powerful and thoughtful. Through her writing, I opened my eyes about Africa and also about the privileges that I am experiencing but did not recognize before. I am so glad that I found her books and have them to guide me to think about lots of important issues. Anyway, she is great, and everyone needs to read her books. Definitely, I am going to 'force' our kids to read them. lol.

There are a lot of reasons why these stories were each amazing and beautiful. For starters, they are #ownvoices, which in itself lends depth to them that is hard to come by from people not familiar with others experiences, but the stories are also varied in many other ways.
I remember first hearing about Adichie from her TEDtalk, the Danger of a Single Story, so I knew not to expect the stories to be similar to each other or to any idea that I had about Africa or African people. Each one is a different part of life for African people. I know that several stories were about Nigerians specifically, but not whether all were. I know Adichie is Nigerian (yes, I even looked up her Wikipedia page to double check), but I don't want to make either assumption that it means all her characters must be Nigerian nor that the experience of people from different countries within Africa are interchangeable. Instead, I'll just point out that I don't know. I do know that one story pointed out where secondary characters were from and the protagonist even refers to them by their country more than their name as they are all new to her.
Getting back to the way the stories were varied, some were immigration stories to the US and others took place in Africa, but even one of those could be loosely categorized as an immigration story because it is about a woman attempting to obtain refugee status to go to the US. It would be difficult to judge the stories against each other on a level of enjoyable as not all are happy or sad, but they all make the reader think about their ideas of how they treat people and how they are treated by people.
I was glad that I listened to the audiobook, read by Adjoa Andoh, because of the character names. Not only would I have mispronounced, but I would have missed out on the lyrical beauty of many of them. The many accents required to read through all the stories were masterfully done as one should expect from an actress of Andoh's accomplishments.
Altogether, it's an enlightening set of stories that should definitely be read by anyone interested in stories about the lives of women. This does not mean that it should be relegated to "chick lit", though. None of the stories are delivered in the "humorously and lightedhardly" style of what is often referred to as chick lit. These are serious stories about women's lives, the struggles, the many forms that heartbreak takes, the difficult decisions that must be contended with. While I wouldn't use the book alone to indicate what African or Nigerian culture is completely about (then we'd fall into the narrow view that Adichie herself cautions against), I would say that it paints an interesting picture of what it is like for some women.
So again, an excellent pick for anyone interested in women's stories, particularly those looking to expand their reading to include stories in more than one country, of moving between countries, of the way lives mix between people of different cultures in several ways. The collection on its own, it still expands the idea of what African stories are and takes us a beyond a single story.

Although I'm not a short story fan, I picked this up because Half of a Yellow Sun is a work of genius and so I'm interested in reading anything Adichie writes (Purple Hibiscus is good too, but with some first-novel problems). The stories in this collection are interesting and well-crafted, but left me with some reservations.

There are 12 unrelated, bite-size short stories in the collection; half are set in Nigeria and another five feature Nigerian immigrants in the northeast United States. The subject matter varies: a teenage girl's brother is wrongly arrested and detained; a retired professor waits for a pension that never comes; a well-educated immigrant takes a job as a nanny for an American family and develops a crush on the child's mother. But there are common themes, in particular the tension between Nigerian political and economic realities that impel people to immigrate, and the difficulties they face in a new country. The stories have diverse plots and are well-structured. A few begin with interesting hooks and then fizzle out, but for the most part they feel complete within their brief page counts. At the same time, many seem to contain the seeds of novels (in a couple of cases, novels she's already written), and are interesting enough that I'd be happy to see them expanded.

The character development is mixed. There are some vivid and three-dimensional characters here, a feat given the length of the stories. On the other hand, the protagonists tend to run together. With few exceptions, they're young Igbo women, from either Lagos or Nsukka, moderately Christian, from relatively privileged backgrounds, seemingly intelligent and hardworking but also a bit wishy-washy and self-righteous, who deal with adversity through silent resentment that eventually either explodes or turns into bitterness. Most of them feel like the same person.

The stories here are also less subtle than Adichie's novels, and with an undercurrent of anger; at times the book feels like an enumeration of Things Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Does Not Like, taking aim at everything from embassy personnel to people who think African fiction ought to focus on atrocities to helicopter parents. Sometimes I found the criticisms incisive (the self-satisfied liberal tourist who observes foreign poverty from a position of comfort); other times they seem less justified (why shouldn't a visa interviewer ask an asylum seeker if she has any proof of her claims?). And while there's good and bad to the Nigerian characters, the portrayal of the Americans is mostly negative.

The writing is good, but the simplicity of Adichie's style comes across as more literary in her novels, with their complex characters and well-developed settings; here it sometimes seems just simple. A couple of the stories use the second person, something all literary writers apparently feel the need to attempt; as always, it's distracting, but fortunately those stories are among the shortest.

Despite the problems, this is one of the better short story collections that I've read, and I enjoyed these more than I generally do short stories. Still, I hope Adichie goes back to writing novels.

Astonishing. In 12 short stories this accomplished Nigerian writer, using her experience and knowledge of Nigerian history and culture as her prism, skillfully encompasses the entirety of being human in a world where how one relates to people can determine happiness or success. Some of the stories are placed in Nigeria, and the authentic detail is marvelous, and some of the stories are of Nigerian immigrants living uneasily in America, uncertain of acceptance by neighbors and employers, while struggling with unfamiliar foods and social customs. All the stories but one are from a woman's standpoint, and in telling their individual stories, the difficulties which are inherent in building bridges to an unseen shore are thoroughly explored. The writing is mature and spare, the author's art of exposing emotion with as few descriptive sentences as necessary is amazing.

Some of my faviorite quotes:

"He used to make me feel that nothing I said was witty enough or sarcastic enough or smart enough. He was always struggling to be different, even when it didn't matter. It was as if he was performing his life instead of living his life."

"How can you love somebody and yet want to manage the amount of happiness that person is allowed?"

"She wanted to interrupt and tell him how unnecessary it was, ths bloodying and binding, this turning faith into a pugilistic exercise; to tell him that life was a struggle with ourselves more than a spear-wielding Satan; that belief was a choice for our conscience always to be sharpened."

"You wanted to write that rich Americans were thin and poor Americans were fat..."

"You did not know that people could simply choose not to go to school, that people could dictate to life. You were used to accepting what life gave, writing down what life dictated."(less)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has that rare ability to portray the contradictions of the human condition. Over and over again, she returns to themes of exile, homesickness, and alienation. In the title story, the young narrator gains a prized American visa and goes to her uncle's home in Maine. "They spoke Igbo and ate garri for lunch and it was like home until your uncle came into the cramped basement where you slept and pulled you forcefully to him..." recalls the barely-adult girl.

Again, in Arrangers of Marriages, a young bride discovers that all is different in America when her new husband tells her, "You don't understand how it works in this country. If you want to get anywhere you have to be as mainstream as possible. If not, you will be left by the roadside." And in Imitation: "She does miss home, though, her friends, the cadence of Igbo and Yoruba and pidgin English spoken around her..."

Home is a complex place. The protagonists, mostly young, mostly female, are often a long way from home, both figuratively and literally. Many have fled or want to flee because of violence - a young woman whose four-year-old son was killed before her eyes, for instance, in The American Embassy. But America, in most instances, is not a panacea. A dream of a college education is traded in for the reality of a waitress job. A man whom is chosen by one woman's family -- "A doctor in America! What could be better?" - is, in reality, a pretentious posturer who insists she speak proper English, change her name, and eat in fast food courts.

And so most of Adichie's characters precariously straddle two worlds. Yet what shines forth is the resilience of the women who take destiny in their own hands and remain unbowed. We meet women who flee from uncomfortable situations with their dignity intact. In Monkey Hill, for example, the protagonist - a writer - is challenged that her character would not give up a lucrative job because she was a "woman with no other choices." She reflects, "The only thing I didn't add in the story is that after I left my coworker and walked out of the alhaji's house, I got into the Jeep and insisted that the driver take me home because I knew it was the last time I would be riding in it."

One of the most affecting stories in this collection, to my mind, is the first story, Cell One, a harrowing tale of the narrator's brother, who is arrested n a roundup of gang suspects and sent to jail. That story ends, "It would have been so easy for him, my charming brother, to make a sleek drama of his story, but he did not." The same might be said about Ms. Adichie, who forgoes the drama for solid story-telling.

"I felt as though I were in a different physical world, on another planet. The people [...] wore a mark of foreignness, otherness, on their faces..." Chinaza, a young Nigerian bride describes her new surroundings in New York. She, like other protagonists in this quietly affecting collection of stories, seeks to adjust to daily life in the United States, a country they could only envision from snippets of information prior to their arrival. With each of the twelve stories, award winning Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie opens a small window into the minds of those who grapple with the challenges of bridging traditional cultures and modern realities, whether within Africa or, as in the majority of stories, across continents.

Her central characters may be young brides, part-time wives, mothers, students or job seekers, whose lives are captured in a crucial or decisive period of time. Through Adichie's perceptive portraits, we gain insights into a wide range of "private experience[s]". We meet Nkem, who, having settled with her husband in the US, has now reason to worry about his continuing life back home in Nigeria. Kamara, a recent immigrant, needs to get by on a babysitting job after her uncle and long-term resident, made unwelcome inappropriate advances. Graduate student Ukamaka, abandoned by her boyfriend, finds an unusual friendship in the most unexpected way... Taken together, these sensitively crafted stories, some more like beautiful, impressionistic vignettes, yet always ending with a surprising twist, create a colourful mosaic of women's efforts to take control of their lives, confronting - with varying level of success - the obstacles they face, be they from their own extended family, the prejudices of their surroundings or from their own lack of understanding.

Four stories are set within Africa, adding depth to our appreciation of Nigerian cultural traditions and conflicts. In 'Jumping Monkey Hill', for example, a group of aspiring authors from different corners of Africa meet at a Safari club for a writers' retreat. While at one level the most satirical story, it raises serious questions on prejudice and multicultural open-mindedness among different African peoples. The last story,'The Headstrong Historian', stands alone among the stories, in terms of structure and subject treatment. Couched in a multi-generational Nigerian family portrait and centred on Mwangba, a strong central female character, it explores the historical and continuing clashes between strong cultural traditions, social progress, and old and new religions. Written in the best African story telling tradition of, eg. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart: A Novel, it confirms Adichie's place among the impressive group of internationally recognized Nigerian authors. At the same time, as the other stories in this collection illustrate, the author is finding her own voice and style to story telling. Two of her stories, for example, are written in the second person, creating an unusually intimate connection between reader and author, with us pondering who the "you" really is.

Most of the stories have been published individually at different times. Nevertheless, bringing them together in one volume will be much appreciated by readers familiar with the author or wanting to explore her writing. Both her novels, Purple Hibiscus: A Novel and Half of a Yellow Sun have won international praise, with HALF OF A YELLOW SUN winning the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. When reading THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK, other comparably excellent story collection on cross-cultural and immigrant experiences come to mind, especially Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies or M.G. Vassanji's When She Was Queen. [Friederike Knabe]

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2007 book "Half of a Yellow Sun" is an almost unbearably powerful novel about life during the short-lived Biafran revolution in Nigeria. "The Thing Around Your Neck" is a collection of short stories that she wrote about two years later. Like her novel, it is often heart-wrenching, although the short-story format perhaps makes it just a little less so.

The opening story, "Cell One," tells of a young Nigerian girl whose brother, arrested on suspicion of being a gang member, endures extremely harsh treatment when he stands up for another prisoner. In "Tomorrow is Too Far" a young woman recalls the story of how her brother died eighteen years earlier, when they were both children, revealing a long-hidden truth about the episode. The title story is particularly powerful, and involves the wife of a dissident journalist, whose young son has been killed by soldiers and who is seeking an asylum visa to the United States.

Not all the stories are equally moving: in particular the two that focus on marital difficulties ("Imitation" and "The Arrangers of Marriage") are not as satisfying. But the book as a whole is a wonderful, engaging read.

(contains mild spoilers)

Anyone who read and liked Americanah would also appreciate this work. Adichie is a writer with impressive range, and it shows in this collection. Although common themes appear throughout the stories - all have Nigerian protagonists or are set in the nation itself - the experiences and moments captured by these short stories are quite varied, ranging from a medical student and streetseller hiding out in an abandoned storefront during a riot between Christians and Muslims to the thoughts of a retired professor musing about both he and his country’s past. In my opinion, the strongest stories in the collection revolve around issues of gender. In “The Arrangers of Marriage”, my personal pick for the best of the set, the narrator has no autonomy in her crappy marriage to a crappier husband. Any fan of ‘Americanah’ will recognize the immigrant experience Adichie captures so well in her full-length work as the narrator argues with her stranger of a husband over what to make for dinner. She tries to fulfill what she has been taught is the ideal wife role, cooking Nigerian meals from scratch. His response is to bring her the “Good Housekeeping All-American Cookbook” and bar her from speaking Igbo in the house. Adichie isn’t afraid to make us hate some of her characters - this guy also his mail-order bride that he married her because she was allegedly a virgin, and threatens to tell the psuedo-parents who sold her dowry that he believes this was not the case. The titular short story also involves gender as a weapon used against female protagonists, and as does ‘Imitation’, which explores how a wealthy Nigerian-American woman reacts upon hearing news that her husband has just moved in with his 21-year-old mistress back in Lagos. Adichie makes a strong case for how patriarchy has damaged and hindered her characters but does not paint them as damsels in distress, devoid of all power. She has not written helpless female characters but instead put strong ones in helpless situations. Basically, this is a great read if you like complex, well-written female characters. If you’re only reading a select few of the stories, I’d also recommend Tomorrow is Too Far - it’s unsettling, creepy and almost Poe-like in its odd narrative structure and dedication to the darkness of its themes.

(contains mild spoilers)

Anyone who read and liked Americanah would also appreciate this work. Adichie is a writer with impressive range, and it shows in this collection. Although common themes appear throughout the stories - all have Nigerian protagonists or are set in the nation itself - the experiences and moments captured by these short stories are quite varied, ranging from a medical student and streetseller hiding out in an abandoned storefront during a riot between Christians and Muslims to the thoughts of a retired professor musing about both he and his country’s past. In my opinion, the strongest stories in the collection revolve around issues of gender. In “The Arrangers of Marriage”, my personal pick for the best of the set, the narrator has no autonomy in her crappy marriage to a crappier husband. Any fan of ‘Americanah’ will recognize the immigrant experience Adichie captures so well in her full-length work as the narrator argues with her stranger of a husband over what to make for dinner. She tries to fulfill what she has been taught is the ideal wife role, cooking Nigerian meals from scratch. His response is to bring her the “Good Housekeeping All-American Cookbook” and bar her from speaking Igbo in the house. Adichie isn’t afraid to make us hate some of her characters - this guy also his mail-order bride that he married her because she was allegedly a virgin, and threatens to tell the psuedo-parents who sold her dowry that he believes this was not the case. The titular short story also involves gender as a weapon used against female protagonists, and as does ‘Imitation’, which explores how a wealthy Nigerian-American woman reacts upon hearing news that her husband has just moved in with his 21-year-old mistress back in Lagos. Adichie makes a strong case for how patriarchy has damaged and hindered her characters but does not paint them as damsels in distress, devoid of all power. She has not written helpless female characters but instead put strong ones in helpless situations. Basically, this is a great read if you like complex, well-written female characters. If you’re only reading a select few of the stories, I’d also recommend Tomorrow is Too Far - it’s unsettling, creepy and almost Poe-like in its odd narrative structure and dedication to the darkness of its themes.

While 11 of the stories in this story come from a distinct perspective - Igbo women usually dealing with America or problems in Nigeria - Adichie is such a fantastic writer that the reader can connect with the basic human nature that she is describing. You become lost in the worlds of the women while even I - a white American male - can connect with the characters.

"Cell One" and "A Private Experience" were my favorites. In "Cell One" a young girl is able to look through the bologna of her parents as they give her nogoodnik brother every benefit of the doubt. "A Private Experience" sees a Hausa and an Igbo woman tied during a Hausa/Igbo riot. The women share their time in a store hiding from the riots - humanity being more important to either of them than their ethnicity.

The last story, "The Headstrong Historian" is quite clever. Intentionally contrived, it harkens directly to Achebe and Things Fall Apart - this time with a woman's perspective.

Once again, Adichie has produced a fantastic book. Each of these short stories are a perfect length - in depth enough to care and not too long as to become bored with a single plot story. Like her previous two books before - 4½ stars!

The second time I picked the book up I was ready to continue reading til the end. These stories, so similar to a charm bracelet of amulets and charms against ill fortune, are stories of power struggle and soul destroying secrets. As the jacket cover states, they are stories about what binds men and women, institutions and the citizens they are supposed to represent, parents and their children. The calmness of voice, perceptive rendering of the people on the scene, is startling. I was confused and disoriented with the mother of the murdered son as she stood in line. I was the girl ready to do ANYthing to survive in a large and discriminatory family. I shuffled along the dusty streets as a retired professor, almost picking up sand to ward off a ghost. The Big Men are similar to 'big'men I have run into throughout my life in the West. The innuendos backing women into corners of life are rampant everywhere, a universal threat to women and those who are disenfranchised. She keeps the language light to hold the heavy issues at hand. I do not feel the Edward was a strawman as suggested by other reviewers. I did, though, find some stories seemed like chapters of books that have not been written, yet. These ended with a sense of incompleteness. On the other hand, some held names familiar to us who have read some of her other works: town names, Harrison as househelp, among some. Adichie is able to capture the complexity and disorientation that comes with being an expat. How what seems a given in a country is totally strange in another: we carry our countries inside us, our memes are activated to assess all that is new around us. The desperation inherent in leaving a place called 'home' no matter how hard it has treated you hangs from every paragraph.
It is not a comfortable book for white Americans to read, but it is equally uncomfortable for Nigerians to hold this mirror up to themselves. A book that needs to be read in quiet, in order to hear the people living and breathing in the stories. I keep learning from this gifted courageous writer.
Please let me know if this review has been interesting, thank you

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's newest novel is a collection of 12 short stories, some of which have been previously printed in journals under different names ("The arrangers of marriage" was published as "New husband" in Iowa Review).

Written in her trademark fluid and highly descriptive style (akin to fellow Nigerian Chinua Achebe's), they tell tales familiar to most Nigerians; Cult activity in Nigerian universities, late (or no) pension payments to retired civil servants, a husband's affair and the troubling effect on the wife, Religious riots in a Northern Nigerian city and their aftermath, a morning at the US embassy, a US visa lottery winner's experience in the US, sibling rivalry, and a new bride's awakening after an arranged marriage to mention a few.

Much like her previous books, the tales usually feature some strong female character (or some seemingly weak and docile female who develops strength over the course of the tale) and are set in reference to some real life occurrences in Nigeria; a plane crash that occurs on the same day as the first lady's death after plastic surgery, living under an oppressive military regime, etc.

My only complaint is that a few of the stories seem to grind to an abrupt halt just when you are expecting them to take further flight. She is just as pretty in the flesh as she appears in photos, I saw her at a book reading and signing for this book last week. Another literary classic!

The thing around your neck is an absorbing and beautiful collection of short stories which blew me away and has sent me off in search of more of her stories. Each story in here, all of them, are utterly gripping and told without labouring the point. Right from the first paragraph in the first story I was gripped.

Cmimamanda Ngozi Adiche tells stories of her native Igbu (sp) people of Nigeria but from many different angles. From the story of a young boy, son of university lecturer and professionals going off the rails as observed by his sister, to the story of young wife installed in a large mansion in America by her husband who finds out her husband has a moved a mistress into their house in Nigeria.

I found the range of stories and tales that Adichie tackled the most interesting. She is able to tell different stories from vastly different people, and tell them sparingly yet with deeply observed nuance. No point is laboured but the ideas flow out of the text richly.

Adichie is now one of my must buy authors.

A collection of short stories is one of my favorite genres for reading. It is rare to find a book of short stories that is consistent in quality. When I do, it is a rare gift. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's, The Thing Around Your Neck, is just such a gift. It consists of stories about Nigeria and the United States, focusing on the clash of cultures and the cultural misunderstandings and prejudices that the protagonists face. This book also includes the short story that I consider my all-time favorite - `The Headstrong Mistress'. I read it for the third time in this collection. I first read it in The New Yorker, then in the Pen/O'Henry Prize Stories of 2010. It gets better each time I read it.

`The Headstrong Mistress' takes us to Nigeria where we meet Ngwambe. She is a woman who believes in the culture of her tribe but is also strong enough to stand up against it if necessary. Ngwambe "is a strong-willed woman hemmed in by custom and circumstance, whose beloved son betrays her in an unimaginable way". Nqwambe is widowed early and grieves the loss of her beloved husband. Despite her son's betrayal, the betrayal of her husband's brothers, and her search for ways to keep her culture alive during a time when colonization and `Christianizing the heathens' is booming, Ngwambe carries on. This story speaks to the strength of marital and inter-generational love and the power of a strong woman.

`A Private Experience' focuses on the clash between science and the old ways. A retired professor of mathematics has not received his retirement pension in over three years due to government corruption. While on campus to check once again to see if his pension monies have arrived, he runs into a man who may or may not be a ghost. They discuss the Biafran war of 1970. The professor thinks about his beloved wife who died a few years ago and who visits him regularly, more in the dry season than during the rainy one. The professor lives in two worlds, the world of mathematics and science and in the old belief system of his people.

`On Monday of Last Week' is about Kamara, an educated African worker who comes to the United States to be reunited with her boyfriend after six years apart. Things are awkward between them. Kamara takes a job as a childcare worker. Her boyfriend's mother is an artist, an elusive and spectral figure. Once Kamara meets her, she asks Kamara about mude modeling. Kamara gives this careful thought and when she returns to the house she says yes, thinking this is a special offer just for her. However, it is a seductive come-on, used for most women who enter the house. Kamara feels heartbreak and shame.

The title story, `The Thing Around Your Neck' is an extraordinarily beautiful tale about an Igbu girl from Lagos who wins a Visa to the United States "where everyone has a house, a car and a gun". She goes to live with her aunt and uncle but leaves because her uncle makes inappropriate sexual advances towards her. As an excuse for his behavior, he tells her that the U.S. is a place of give and take. She ends up in Connecticut, bitter and perspicaciously observant of American culture. She sends money to her family but not letters. The thing around her neck is tight when she tries to sleep but loosens once she's in a relationship with a college boy. The clash of cultures and the loneliness that comes on its tail is painful to read about.

In `The American Embassy', a woman has lost her son to soldiers as a result of her journalist husband's anti-government article. She is waiting on line at the U.S. embassy to seek political asylum in the U.S. While on line, she reminisces about her marriage, her son, and the events leading to her son's death. When it finally comes time for her to be interviewed by a U.S. embassy employee, she is unable to recount the political events leading up to her son's death. She feels she would be using her son's death to her own advantage. Towards the end of the interview, she turns around and walks out.

The book contains twelve stories, all top-notch and all dealing with the convergence of cultures, usually the United States and Nigeria. Adiche writes so beautifully that I can not read her stories just once. Painful though they are, I can see myself reading them again and again. She gets the human predicament, especially the predicament of the poor, those with no options, and the contradictions between old beliefs and new ones. She is also able to see the false beliefs that people take on when they think they are acculturated or part of the larger society. She knows they are still outside looking in, and always will be.

The Thing Around Your Neck is a collection of short stories with heavy socio-political themes, featuring mostly Nigerian characters. While the author is very talented as evidenced by her previous novels and this current one, I do however think she should stick to novel-length work because it gives her a chance to deeply explore her characters. I think Ms. Adichie's strength as a writer lies in her unique ability to create unforgettable, layered, true-to-life characters and the short story format severely restricts her ability to go much further beyond bringing the characters to birth.

I am hesitant to do a story by story critique but I will say some stories are better than others. A couple unfortunately seem like they are start nowhere and go nowhere but I will not specify which those are so as not to deter anyone from reading what is a good compilation of short stories. But I will say that the title story is my absolute favorite and the last story comes in at a close second. I am also appreciative of the author for as always birthing strong, female characters worth emulating. That was the primary lesson I came away with.

I have recently found out that I do not like reading a collection of short stories and this is the only one I have been able to finish in recent times so that earns it a four. It was all fresh for me since I had not been following Chmamanda's articles online or in print and I liked most of the stories but it does lack the same depth that you get from a full length novel which I am beginning to think is common to short stories in general. But it's my favorite of any group of short stories I have come across recently. I am yet to read Half of a Yellow Sun however though it is on my dresser and I look forward to it.

"That Thing Around Your Neck" is a very good collection of short stories that give you a glimpse into Nigeria and its many cultures. Some of the stories can leave you wondering for more information or some conclusion (i.e. Imitation)...but then I guess it wouldn't be a short story! Chima quickly brings you into her stories, and you're not bored by it or smothered with useless characters. Anyway, this is good reading!

This is the strongest book I have read in years. It is impossible to read without having your world rearranged. I particularly liked the stories "The Headstrong Historian" and "Jumping Monkey Hill" which should be required reading. The thing that gives these stories such strength is that the people are not just victims in terrible circumstances. Instead a woman is portrayed as strong and standing up and saying "No more, enough and walking away." This book tells it like it is for some of today's Nigerians. If only those who should pay attention would get the message.

Chimamanda is a very accessible writer. She presents a beautiful collection of tales, with African women, especially Igbo women, at the centre of the tales.

Her style is free-flowing, highly redolent of one who has mastered the art of story telling.Her diction is not too facile or incomprehensible. This serves to engage the reader fully, and one gets to appreciate the plainness, simplicity, strength, and beauty of her prose.

The story I loved the most was "Ghosts", followed by "The Headstrong Historian".Most of the other stories were good but some did not resonate well with me.I felt they were a bit weak in content, and the themes were lost on me.However this is not to take away any credit from Chimamanda.

She pits Western ideals against traditional Igbo values, and leaves the reader to judge which is better. However, in some instances,I believe she tacitly admits that the Igbo norms and cultures are superior to Western ways with their detachment from communal norms, a lack of respect for age, religious morality etc.The African is presented most times in the best possible light,but this does not mean an abdication of blame in the ills that forever plague us in the developing parts of the world.In some stories, the inane practices of pre-existing traditional societies is mentioned e.g curbing promiscuity by insertion of herbs into the female.It would have been nice to see a condemnation of such practices.However, that was not the point of that particular story.

There is an overt feminist tone in most of the stories, which is quite understandable .And I commend her depiction of strong, feminine characters, the situations they encounter, and how they are dealt with in every facet of daily existence.

As an African, and Nigerian, I am proud of Chimamanda's achievements so far, and hope that her success will open the doors for other young, fledgling writers in Nigeria, who are seeking an avenue to be read by the rest of the world.Indeed, there are more stories in that part of the African continenet waiting to be told.

An intense often emotional read. I was engrossed in 98% of the stories and was disappointed when they ended (the sign of a great short story collection- it leaves you wanting more). I am now a fan of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's and have already purchased Americanah, which I cannot wait to star!

Chimamanda writes well but for some reason I don't finish her books. However I like her short story collection especially the actual story "the thing around your neck". I have read it several times and it makes me cry every time!

This collection of stories is a must read for two groups of readers: those who love short stories and those who don't care for short stories. For my money Adichie is one of the great writers of our time--no qualifyers necessary--and her short works are as powerful and mature as her novels. A few writers are so good that they are seemingly incapable of writing a bad sentence. Adichie is in that group.

I like this author, but this collection of short stories misses the mark for me. I only found one or two of the stories likeable, the remaining stories are mostly forgettable. I'll keep reading her work because I enjoy the African slant.

This is a collection of stories, some of which have been collected online in such publications as the Granta, new Yorker, etc. They are as interesting as they were the first time and the few new ones too. I however think that some of them lack a certain dept and are very easy to forget once you have closed the page.

Myne Whitman
A Heart to Mend

"It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a grand scale, and men going at it blind--as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness." -Joseph Conrad

Ngozi Adichie's short stories tend to consist of various criticisms of America. The Nigerian characters have the unfortunate habit of taking on a self-righteous tone as they make superficial observations about Americans--generally negative--without giving much thought to how Americans might have gotten that way.

Kamara, the protagonist in "On Monday of Last Week," is a good example. She's critical of virtually every facet of the American family for whom she works--though she never criticizes herself for specifically disobeying her employer's orders (allowing, for example, the child she babysits to dump his vegetable drink down the sink). Even before she's hired, she's irritated that Neil, her employer, compliments her English because she believes he assumes "English was somehow his personal property." This borders on silly. Neil lives in a country in which at least 300 million people speak English; surely he doesn't think of the language as strictly his own personal property. Also, it seems likely that if Neil had spoken perfect Igbo (a language spoken in Nigeria), Kamara would have been surprised (as in "The Thing Around Your Neck," in which the Nigerian character is surprised when a restaurant patron merely demonstrates knowledge of racial differences in Nigeria).

On page 78 Kamara gets upset because Neil speaks to her "as people spoke to housegirls back in Nigeria." She feels deeply resentful that she's a babysitter in spite of her master's degree. This tells us that Nigeria is a class-oriented society where women like Kamara have the right to speak as they choose to lower-class Nigerians--but that's okay. And Neil didn't hire her for her master's; he hired her as a nanny. On page 82 she makes this observation: "a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one's child were the exception rather than the rule." Kamara goes on to slag off American women talking about parenting on tv. This is about the extent of Kamara's experience of living in America: criticisms of Neil's household and America in general. There's nothing about Kamara's living situation or her experience outside of the household.

"Jumping Monkey Hill" is an obvious, heavy-handed and unlikely diatribe against colonialism--as if anyone has to be persuaded colonialism is one of humanity's worst ideas. The narrator, Ujunwa, seems unaware of her own condescending attitude, imagining the resort at which she will be staying to be full of "affluent foreign tourists [who] would dart around taking pictures of lizards and then return home still mostly unaware that there were more black people than red-capped lizards in South Africa." It seems rather presumptuous to assume that is all the tourists have come for. And if the tourists took photos of Africans, the narrator would undoubtedly complain--as does Akunna in "The Thing Around Your Neck"--that Africans are just "exotic trophies, ivory tusks."

Ujunwa continues her criticisms after being complimented on her looks by an Englishwoman: Her first thought "is to ask if Isabel ever needed royal blood to explain the good looks of friends back in London." On page 102 the African writers have a general belly-aching session mostly about white authors who have written about Africa. The implication is that whites have no right to write about Africans nor any right to their opinions about colonialism--an odd position to take since that would, conversely, preclude Adichie from writing about America and Americans. Nor is a professor who defends Conrad entitled to argue his position; he believes Conrad took the side of the Africans--"as if [the Senegalese writer] could not decide for herself who was on her side." Again, the implication is that only Africans are allowed to discuss Africa or form an opinion about Joseph Conrad's writing about Africa. Freedom of speech and free exchange of ideas anyone?

This point is hammered home throughout the story by the way Edward--white, Oxford-educated, and host for the African writers--comes out with lines such as "homosexual stories of this sort [aren't] reflective of Africa really." Followed by lots of self-righteous indignation from the African authors. There is more figurative rapping of Edward's knuckles on page 112: "Imagine an African gathering with no rice, and why should beer be banned at the dinner table just because Edward thought wine was proper and breakfast at 8 was too early, never mind that Edward said it was the `right' time and the smell of his pipe was nauseating ..." Edward is a straw-man Adichie has set up for target practice.

"The Thing Around Your Neck" begins with some very heavy-handed advice for a character headed to America: "Don't buy a gun like those Americans." (As if in Africa children aren't running around with AK-47s.) The narrator moves from Lagos to "a small white town in Maine," where she is taken in by her "uncle" whose wife "had to drive an hour to find a hair salon that did black hair." We then get a paragraph about how ignorant and arrogant Americans are collectively. This is followed by another paragraph of the narrator's disdain: "white people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same--condescending." In other words, American attitudes toward Africa have to be approved by Adichie--like fairytale porridge, they have to be "just right."

"The American Embassy" is perhaps the cake-taker when it comes to America bashing : "Sometimes I wonder if the American embassy people look out of their window and enjoy watching the soldiers flogging people," says the man in line behind the protagonist. The problem with this statement is that there is no behavior on the part of the "American embassy people" to even suggest that, let alone support it. It's simply thrown out there without any justification. It is also interesting that when a Nigerian soldier beats a Nigerian citizen, it is somehow an American problem. At the end we have a reiteration, it seems, of the attitude that if you are not African, you can't understand Africa or Africans: "[The protagonist's] future rested on that face [of the interviewer at the American embassy]. The face of a person who did not understand her, who probably did not cook with palm oil, or know that palm oil when fresh was a bright, bright red and when not fresh, congealed to a lumpy orange." It might have helped if the main character had actually answered the interviewer's questions, but she's too full of contempt to bother. It's also rather presumptuous: the interviewer very well may cook with palm oil and know what it looks like when it's fresh; she lives in Africa, and she may also have a grasp of African politics. It's hard to see a cultural obstacle here although the main character has clearly imagined one.

Overall, there's a disappointing lack of information about the lives of transplanted Nigerians. I'd love to know what Lagos is like, how the smell of Maine differs from the smell of the Nigerian capital, how Akunna felt surrounded by deciduous trees in Maine rather than palms, how a sunset in Maine affected her as compared with one in Lagos. And these are just a few simple questions of topography. There are numerous others that go unanswered. I'd like to know what (and who) these characters miss, if they miss speaking their native tongue and the like. I'd also like to read STORIES rather than hear characters grinding woe-is-me axes.

You are probably better off skipping this book unless you are interested in self-righteous whining.

For adult readers, this is terrific writing! I had hoped that I could use some of these stories in my high-school English class, but every one has deep-seated, brooding sexual issues that I'm not quite prepared to share with 14-year-olds. Pity. A great read for adults.

The stories in this volume are emotionally powerful and compelling. Adichie writes beautifully, and with intelligence and feeling. In particular, I found the title story to stay with me emotionally for quite a while. Quite simply, this is an excellent read.

"The Headstrong Historian" is the only gem in this collection of utterly dry, spiritless and just boring stories. Barely any characters come alive on the page. I'm tempted to say that some of these stories were constructed from the idle thoughts or perhaps journal entries of Adichie during her first few years in America. Not every immigrant narrative is interesting, though. Also, not every story about the political troubles of a nation should be seen as "real, serious" fiction and met with glowing reviews. Let your liberal guilt aside and perhaps you will see Adichie's writing, characters and storytelling for what they are: "Meh" at best.
Most of these stoires are so rushed, underdeveloped, uninteresting and warrant no sympathy for the characters within them.I was disgusted especially at the second story because of the SPINELESS main character, which brings me to my next point. Many characters in these stories are just uninspired and insipid. I understand the difficulty of crafting a short story but please remember writing a long list of events that happens to a character does not a story make. Where is the action, the sense of urgency, the active, interesting, varied characters? Carbon copies with different names being moved around to different locations does not work... at least not for me.
In conclusion, Miss Adichie can thank Chinua Achebe for providing "The Headstrong Historian" with the spirit she so obviously lifted from "Things Fall Apart."

P.S. "The thing around your neck" is an awful book title, especially since the story that explains it is an amateur attempt at being "touching."
That is all.