Sefi Atta, Swallow

This is by another writer new to me but recommended by colleagues at the Africa Network (see notes on the Ugandan stories posted yesterday).  Like Tropical Fish, and like an older novel I have used in my class, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, it recounts the experiences of a young woman caught between tradition and modernity in contemporary Africa.  Unlike Dangarembga the narrator begins the story when her protagonist has already reached adulthood, and the story concerns the challenges a city like Lagos puts before a young woman trying to make her way, dealing with officemates and a lecherous boss as well as friends whose  judgment about how to get ahead sometimes proves disastrously wrong.  Yoruba tradition makes its appearance primarily in imagined or recalled conversations with the protagonist's mother, who becomes a flesh and blood presence when the protagonist flees the pressures of the city to return to her village for a time.

As a window into contemporary urban life in West Africa this is a valuable book.  I'm not sure what to make of it as a novel, though:  some scenes and events unfold in ways that are too easy to see coming, and some characters seem underdeveloped, occupiers of certain places in the story more than real people.  Leila Aboulela, a Sudanese writer whose work I admire (and whom Susan and I took out to dinner at last year's Festival of Faith and Learning here at Calvin), hails Swallow on the back cover as "a bold, distinctive novel from a writer who doesn't compromise her integrity."  That may be right, but I'm not entirely convinced.  I have another of Atta's novels from the library--her first, and a winner of some awards--and I look forward to reading it.