• Complain

Chimamanda Adichi - The Thing Around Your Neck

Here you can read online Chimamanda Adichi - The Thing Around Your Neck full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: London, year: 2009, publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers, genre: Prose. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Chimamanda Adichi The Thing Around Your Neck
  • Book:
    The Thing Around Your Neck
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    HarperCollinsPublishers
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2009
  • City:
    London
  • ISBN:
    978007321049
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The Thing Around Your Neck: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Thing Around Your Neck" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

From Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Orange Prize-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, come twelve dazzling stories in which she turns her penetrating eye on the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the West.In A Private Experience, a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears shes been pushing away. In Tomorrow Is Too Far, a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brothers death. The young mother at the center of Imitation finds her comfortable life threatened when she learns that her husband back in Lagos has moved his mistress into their home. And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to re-examine them.Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow and longing, this collection is a resounding confirmation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies prodigious storytelling powers.

Chimamanda Adichi: author's other books


Who wrote The Thing Around Your Neck? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Thing Around Your Neck — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Thing Around Your Neck" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The Thing Around Your Neck

For Ivara

Cell One

The first time our house was robbed, it was our neighbor Osita who climbed in through the dining room window and stole our TV, our VCR, and the Purple Rain and Thriller videotapes my father had brought back from America. The second time our house was robbed, it was my brother Nnamabia who faked a break-in and stole my mothers jewelry. It happened on a Sunday. My parents had traveled to our hometown, Mbaise, to visit our grandparents, so Nnamabia and I went to church alone. He drove my mothers green Peugeot 504. We sat together in church as we usually did, but we did not nudge each other and stifle giggles about somebodys ugly hat or threadbare caftan, because Nnamabia left without a word after about ten minutes. He came back just before the priest said, The Mass is ended. Go in peace. I was a little piqued. I imagined he had gone off to smoke and to see some girl, since he had the car to himself for once, but he could at least have told me where he was going. We drove home in silence and, when he parked in our long driveway, I stopped to pluck some ixora flowers while Nnamabia unlocked the front door. I went inside to find him standing still in the middle of the parlor.

Weve been robbed! he said in English.

It took me a moment to understand, to take in the scattered room. Even then, I felt that there was a theatrical quality to the way the drawers were flung open, as if it had been done by somebody who wanted to make an impression on the discoverers. Or perhaps it was simply that I knew my brother so well. Later, when my parents came home and neighbors began to troop in to say ndo, and to snap their fingers and heave their shoulders up and down, I sat alone in my room upstairs and realized what the queasiness in my gut was: Nnamabia had done it, I knew. My father knew, too. He pointed out that the window louvers had been slipped out from the inside, rather than outside (Nnamabia was really much smarter than that; perhaps he had been in a hurry to get back to church before Mass ended), and that the robber knew exactly where my mothers jewelry was the left corner of her metal trunk. Nnamabia stared at my father with dramatic, wounded eyes and said, I know I have caused you both terrible pain in the past, but I would never violate your trust like this. He spoke English, using unnecessary words like terrible pain and violate, as he always did when he was defending himself. Then he walked out through the back door and did not come home that night. Or the next night. Or the night after. He came home two weeks later, gaunt, smelling of beer, crying, saying he was sorry and he had pawned the jewelry to the Hausa traders in Enugu and all the money was gone.

How much did they give you for my gold? my mother asked him. And when he told her, she placed both hands on her head and cried, Oh! Oh! Chi m egbuom! My God has killed me! It was as if she felt that the least he could have done was get a good price. I wanted to slap her. My father asked Nnamabia to write a report: how he had sold the jewelry, what he had spent the money on, with whom he had spent it. I didnt think Nnamabia would tell the truth, and I dont think my father thought he would, either, but he liked reports, my professor father, he liked things written down and nicely documented. Besides, Nnamabia was seventeen, with a carefully tended beard. He was in that space between secondary school and university and was too old for caning. What else could my father have done? After Nnamabia wrote the report, my father filed it in the steel drawer in his study where he kept our school papers.

That he could hurt his mother like this was the last thing my father said, in a mutter.

But Nnamabia really hadnt set out to hurt her. He did it because my mothers jewelry was the only thing of any value in the house: a lifetimes collection of solid gold pieces. He did it, too, because other sons of professors were doing it. This was the season of thefts on our serene Nsukka campus. Boys who had grown up watching Sesame Street, reading Enid Blyton, eating cornflakes for breakfast, attending the university staff primary school in smartly polished brown sandals, were now cutting through the mosquito netting of their neighbors windows, sliding out glass louvers, and climbing in to steal TVs and VCRs. We knew the thieves. Nsukka campus was such a small place the houses sitting side by side on tree-lined streets, separated only by low hedges that we could not but know who was stealing. Still, when their professor parents saw one another at the staff club or at church or at a faculty meeting, they continued to moan about riffraff from town coming onto their sacred campus to steal.

The thieving boys were the popular ones. They drove their parents cars in the evening, their seats pushed back and their arms stretched out to reach the steering wheel. Osita, the neighbor who had stolen our TV only weeks before the Nnamabia incident, was lithe and handsome in a brooding sort of way and walked with the grace of a cat. His shirts were always sharply ironed; I used to look across the hedge and see him and close my eyes and imagine that he was walking toward me, coming to claim me as his. He never noticed me. When he stole from us, my parents did not go over to Professor Ebubes house to ask him to ask his son to bring back our things. They said publicly that it was riffraff from town. But they knew it was Osita. Osita was two years older than Nnamabia; most of the thieving boys were a little older than Nnamabia, and perhaps that was why Nnamabia did not steal from another persons house. Perhaps he did not feel old enough, qualified enough, for anything bigger than my mothers jewelry.

Nnamabia looked just like my mother, with that honey-fair complexion, large eyes, and a generous mouth that curved perfectly. When my mother took us to the market, traders would call out, Hey! Madam, why did you waste your fair skin on a boy and leave the girl so dark? What is a boy doing with all this beauty? And my mother would chuckle, as though she took a mischievous and joyful responsibility for Nnamabias good looks. When, at eleven, Nnamabia broke the window of his classroom with a stone, my mother gave him the money to replace it and did not tell my father. When he lost some library books in class two, she told his form-mistress that our houseboy had stolen them. When, in class three, he left early every day to attend catechism and it turned out he never once went and so could not receive Holy Communion, she told the other parents that he had malaria on the examination day. When he took the key of my fathers car and pressed it into a piece of soap that my father found before Nnamabia could take it to a locksmith, she made vague sounds about how he was just experimenting and it didnt mean a thing. When he stole the exam questions from the study and sold them to my fathers students, she shouted at him but then told my father that Nnamabia was sixteen, after all, and really should be given more pocket money.

I dont know whether Nnamabia felt remorse for stealing her jewelry. I could not always tell from my brothers gracious, smiling face what it was he really felt. And we did not talk about it. Even though my mothers sisters sent her their gold earrings, even though she bought an earring-and-pendant set from Mrs. Mozie, the glamorous woman who imported gold from Italy, and began to drive to Mrs. Mozies house once a month to pay for it in installments, we never talked, after that day, about Nnamabias stealing her jewelry. It was as if pretending that Nnamabia had not done the things he had done would give him the opportunity to start afresh. The robbery might never have been mentioned again if Nnamabia had not been arrested three years later, in his third year in the university, and locked up at the police station.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Thing Around Your Neck»

Look at similar books to The Thing Around Your Neck. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Chimamanda Adichie - Americanah
Americanah
Chimamanda Adichie
No cover
No cover
Ngozi Chimamanda
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Notes on Grief
Notes on Grief
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - We Should All Be Feminists
We Should All Be Feminists
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
No cover
No cover
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie]
No cover
No cover
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
No cover
No cover
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Reviews about «The Thing Around Your Neck»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Thing Around Your Neck and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.