The word it hinges on is gender, but gender expansiveness petals outward to all of life, an inherent queering of inherited and invented narratives. Emezi is a master of writing this expansiveness. Vivek’s embodied fulcrum is expansiveness, is possibility, with all of its attendant joy and ache.
And in Emezi’s skilled hands, the mosaic of love, pain, community, family, trauma, and beauty, that make the crown to which Vivek is the bloody jewel, is crafted into an unforgettable and deeply moving story. The fact that the reader knows it from the start makes what happens in between all the more interesting. Their storytelling prowess goes beyond the idea of giving away an ending. He glows like the sun, impossible to look at directly yet utterly charismatic. Instead of getting flattened by death, Vivek becomes more vivid on each page. Literary writers and critic often scorn characterization this flat, but Emezi uses their stock characters effectively as points of contrast to the mutable, grieving Kavita and Osita-and, more importantly, to Vivek. If Emezi keeps one norm from crime fiction, it is their use of stock characters. Emezi abandons death to focus on the complicated joys of Vivek's life, which I very much do not want to spoil for the reader, but which are joyful indeed. Emezi deftly tucks doomed romance and family drama into mystery, then, slowly but surely, reveals their true aim: to construct a portrait of love triumphant over death. It's always impressive to see a writer transform between novels in this way, but Vivek Oji would be impressive regardless. Where Freshwater refuses traditional storytelling, Vivek Oji adopts the form-though never the spirit-of traditional crime fiction, seeming to glory in the genre's conventions before slyly subverting them.
0 kommentar(er)
