The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi | ARC Review

The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

• Publisher: Fable & Fable, August 20th 2020
• Genre: Literary Fiction, LGBTQ+
• Format: eARC
• Page Count: 256 pages
• My Rating: ★★★★ (4/5)

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I know what they say about men who allow other men to penetrate them. Ugly things; ugly words. Calling them women, as if that’s supposed to be ugly, too. I’d heard it since secondary school, and I knew what that night was supposed to make me. Less than a man—something disgusting, something weak and shameful. But if that pleasure was supposed to stop me from being a man, then fine. They could have it. I’d take the blinding light of his touch, the blessed peace of having him so close, and I would stop being a man. I was never one to begin with, anyway.

Content warnings: death, incest, rape, infidelity, abuse, misogyny

I don’t know how Emezi does it, but they managed to make Vivek’s story breathtaking.

The Death of Vivek Oji is bold as it is beautiful. Told in both first person perspectives of Vivek and cousin Osita as well as third person points of view, Vivek’s chapters are shorter because his* life was short. But then his narration becomes slightly longer as he starts to live. The timeline is not linear but it was never hard to follow. It has its own flow of interconnected events and characters’ thoughts instead of being in chronological order. Sometimes Vivek was dead and sometimes he was not. It is haunting and works strangely well. [* I use he/him/his pronouns for Vivek because that is what Emezi used throughout most of the book. The last pronoun referring to Vivek by Osita is also masculine.]

The deliberate choice of including Igbo vocabulary into conversations and narration feels very intimate. Sentences reading like direct translations of Igbo vividly reflects the Nigerian setting.

In The Death of Vivek Oji, everything is intertwined: the idea of life and death, discovery of love and sex and relationships, exploration of gender and sexuality, and finding roots and home. The eerie atmosphere of the book is almost paranormal. And this ghostly element plays into every part of the story as well.

With the main theme being queer identities, there are also implicit pansexuality and gender fluidity. The friendship between Vivek, Osita, Juju, Elizabeth, Somto, and Olunne is precious. “They barely understood him themselves, but they loved him, and that had been enough.” An important part of the story is also about the nature of Vivek and Osita’s relationship. They are cousins, so their love is incestuous. But this paints the picture of Vivek so well and heightens all his struggles. I find myself feeling okay about their tender yet tabooed relationship.

There are two things I cannot fully enjoy. One is the truth of Vivek’s death. Compared to the intensity and beauty of the whole book, it falls flat even though that might be the most meaningful ending possible. Another is the hysteria of older women. Far too often we have literature depicting hysterical women, and I just cannot seem to forget about the occasional ridiculousness of Mary and Kavita.

Life was like being dragged through concrete in circles, wet and setting concrete that dried with each rotation of my unwilling body.

The book is dark and painful and joyous. The death of Vivek is not only the death of a living person, but the death of a past identity. It is fear that kills, but it is also killing that liberates in The Death of Vivek Oji. [20 Aug 2020]

I received an e-ARC from Faber & Faber via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.