Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s newly released book, Dream Count deals beautifully with the fallibility of perception. It is told from the perspectives of
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s newly released book, Dream Count deals beautifully with the fallibility of perception. It is told from the perspectives of four connected women — travel writer Chia, who grew up in Nigeria but lives in America, her best friend Zikora, her outspoken cousin, Omelogor and her housekeeper, Kadiatou.
The reader is treated to rich portraits of their love lives, their desires and their experiences of womanhood, from childbirth and painful periods to the indignity and unfairness of a ticking body clock.
The novel opens unglamorously in the middle of the pandemic, with Chia worrying about having touched her face before washing her hands and having dismal discussions over Zoom about loo roll shortages. Yet lockdown is a vehicle for Chia to do that very 2020 thing: to pause and reflect. She looks back on a catalogue of failed romances which have culminated in her being “confronted with the crime of singleness” in her forties, with relatives begging her to get IVF.
First there is Darnell, a moody intellectual who is contemptuous of Chia’s frivolous travel writing and family money (her father is a wealthy businessman in Nigeria) yet also preoccupied with the spoils of it. Chia is constantly seeking the approval of Darnell and his sanctimonious academic friends, who are “tribal, but anxiously so” and describe everything as “problematic”. To them, Chia is a contradiction. As her cousin puts it: “They can’t stand rich people from poor countries, because it means they can’t feel sorry for you.”
Others attempt to mould Chia into the person they think she ought to be: a New York editor expresses interest in her, but asks if she’ll write about, say, the war in Sudan.
Our expectations are confounded in real time alongside the characters.
There is Chuka, the man who seems so square, who wears his shirt tucked in even at weekends and reads books about leadership and project management. Chia has sex with him not because she wants to, but because he somehow deserved it, being so proper and attentive. She thinks the sex will be pedestrian, yet he ends up proving her “unutterably wrong”.
Chia pivots from describing him as a strait-laced bore to admitting that “Chuka was my old-fashioned fantasy: a manly man”.
Just as in real life, the characters’ perceptions of each other are constantly overwriting themselves.
