I had quite a wild ride with Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo. It is not a long book but I went in knowing next to nothing and it took some time for me to acclimate to the setting and the style and the structure. And then I was tempted to DNF the book but it wasn’t exactly the book’s fault: it covers some very tough ground and I felt like I was being forced to live in a dreamworld of my worst nightmares. Yet I was drawn into the characters and into their world and before I knew it I had so many questions, so many things peeping out at me from behind the family room curtains and the door at the end of the hall… I had to know what exactly was going down here! It’s a little fever-dreamish, yet most of the clouds clear before the final page and while I didn’t have a clue how I actually felt about the book as I read, I finished feeling like I had just read one of the best (most masterful) books I’d read in a while. And that’s saying a lot.

Yejide and Akin fell in love at university and married. Their plans are to have children and walk into the future of Nigeria together as a family. But time passes and there are no children and women start showing up with family members on their doorstep, options for a second wife. But Yejide and Akin have agreed to a marriage without polygamy. Can they withstand the pressures of family and cultural expectations? Or can Yejide get pregnant before the new wife truly inserts herself between them—and in the way of their happiness and love? Can a happy marriage be built on the kind of secrecy and sacrifice that it will require to produce a child?

I read this book for book club. I don’t know that I had encountered it before, but while the title and book cover are good, they’re not the kind to stand out among all those other options. It was published in 2017 and won some awards and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. At that point, it was Adebayo’s debut novel, though her shorts had been published in some of the top literary magazines. I really didn’t know what to expect, but I bought a copy, read the back cover copy, and then dug right in.

I mean, it’s African literature, more specifically Nigerian literature. I have read a limited amount of modern, African novels, which of course includes Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (which was so long ago that it does not a review here nor do I remember it that well). I have not gotten very far on my World Literature lists or my sub-lists, which includes an African list (which puts North Africa on a separate list with the Middle East). Which means that I have some sense of writing from this part of the world, but not a whole lot. As with much of African literature, Stay with Me was written in English, so there was not a literal translation, but there is a lot of literary tradition and cultural context that accompanies any reading and Stay with Me requires a further political understanding of Nigeria to really take it all in. However, Adebayo doesn’t rely completely on an education in the culture preceding the reading. In other words, you’ll get it and you will learn things as you go, you’ll have enough of a sense to picture the setting and to understand the characters even if you are not an African scholar or an expert on Nigeria. However, I wish I had done a little more research to contextualize the book and the specific culture (Ilesa, Nigeria; Yoruba, in the tension between the tradition and modernity) and history (1980s all the way to 2008). I had the feeling that the political moments happening in the background of the story (on the TV, on the street…) were a key to understanding the story as a whole, maybe a metaphor or contrast or something. But I didn’t know enough to fully catch it.

Even without those layers of understanding, I really liked this book and can celebrate it, can recommend it. Which means I’ve come a long way. Why? Because for the first hundred pages or so, I kept thinking “This is torture.” Not because of the writing, but because of the topics and the struggles inside the plot. I mean, both polygamy and losing a child are my worst nightmares and I felt trapped inside Yejide’s pain and frustration dealing with these things. Especially considering she was also trapped by her changing culture and the love that she actually shared with her husband. It was… torture. But the writing was so good. And the characters nuanced and interesting and sympathetic. And the story become more and more engaging as layers of secrecy and mystery built up on what would otherwise be a pretty straight-forward tale of domestic tragedy. I was on the edge of my seat every time I picked the book back up, breathing through the panic attack I was practically having due to the topics, the general scenario of family meddling (codependence?) included.

It didn’t help that I was initially confused about perspective. Many of the synopses include a mention that the story is told from both Yejide’s (the wife) and Akin’s (the husband) perspective. I think this is meant as a nudge, one that I didn’t notice. Because you don’t really figure this out for some time into the book, and the POV flips back and forth without clear indicators (like a title or just a name in the center of the page.) In fact, even after you realize that it’s changing back and forth, you can’t tell right away in some sections which character is giving us their POV. Why not be more clear? I dunno. Does it seem less cheesy to make us figure it out? I suppose it is more “literary” to make us figure it out, but I think that being more clear about it would have been less distracting. Then, now and again, the tense changes to present. Sometimes it goes back and forth. I think the idea is to distinguish between flashbacks and the story’s “present” (I would have to go back and look to make sure), but I found these switches to also be distracting, especially when the writing style is often closer to stream of consciousness than a chronology. (This is true for many, many of the books I have read lately.) So I’m just saying that there is some (in my opinion needlessly) distracting structure to the story, but it’s not pervasive and I did eventually get used to how to read the book.

Then suddenly I realized it was a mystery. Or a thriller. But very subtly in the background, completely submissive to a more literary fiction and African tradition. Which made the pace really start to move, though the political background moments really threw a speed bump in the road. I’m sure there was some reason for them to be there, but it certainly slowed things to suddenly be talking politics in the middle of a domestic mystery. I kinda liked how the mystery only slowly revealed that there was a mystery. I felt like I could trust myself in Adebayo’s hands, somehow. Once or twice I felt like I must have missed something, but it turns out its not that mysterious. Eventually things are spelled out. There is great tension in this book, especially for lit fic.

So the trick is to know what you are about to read. Not only should you probably know that it is a domestic mystery, almost thriller, set in Nigeria in the 80s and presented as African literary fiction, a short read, but that the structure is first person POV back and forth between Ajide and Akin, the husband and wife, and that there are occasional flashbacks and even tense changes (mostly in past) and also that there are chapters that take place in 2018, beginning with the first one (these transitions being abundantly clear). So we see clues about what happened back in the 80s. It’s also really important to realize there are some major triggers here, including the loss of a child, fertility issues, and polygamy. Also abuse and codependent/domineering families. Even though several of those topics are triggers for me, I finished this book thinking that it was the bees knees, like took a breath and dropped my shoulders, That was a great book. There a lot of tragedy and pain, grief and a harsh light on traditional Yoruba culture as it conflicts with a modern one, but it’s told beautifully and really pulls the reader into the space. It is a little torturous (because it’s meant to be), but is a fricking amazing debut novel, still extremely readable and full of dynamic characters and emotion and fueled by secrets and twists.

Ayobami Adebayo (more accurately Ayòbámi Adébáyò, but I’m still missing two dots (under the o’s) that I cannot find on my computer) is really young to have written the book I just read. Sure, it was published in 2017, a few years ago, but it was her debut novel. Her second novel, A Spell of Good Things, was published last year but did not do as well as her first. I am considering reading it, even so. It’s not like it has bad reviews. I do have an eye on her career, at this point. There’s not much else to say. She pops up in literary magazines and residencies and fellowships and I’m glad to have a fresh, skilled, diverse voice joining the TBR. (Like many currently producing authors, she keeps a pretty low profile, remains pretty private. You can see her website HERE.)

“But even when it’s in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love” (p18).

“It’s the truth—stretched, but still true. Besides, what would be left of love without truth stretched beyond its limits, without those better versions of ourselves that we present as the only ones that exist?” (p75).

“’If a lie travels for twenty years, even a hundred years, it will take one day—” She raises her right hand, points the index finger at the ceiling. “It will take one day for the truth to catch up with a lie. The truth caught up with you today, Akin’” (p75-76).

“…because a mother does not do what she wants, she does what is best for her child” (p150).

“’So you went to the white man’s school and I didn’t. But we have seen enough of you school types to know schooling is not wisdom, for many of you it is foolishness, like settling for treatment when there is a cure’” (p168).

“I was not strong enough to love when I could lose again, so I could lose again, so I held her loosely, with little hope, sure that somehow she too would manage to slip from my grasp” (p180).

“…already I was realizing that all the rage had been an affectation. Something I’d reached for to use as a defense against shame” (p212).

“Yejide, love is like a test” (p229).

“But that night, because when life laughs at you, you laigh and pretend you are in on the joke, I nodded along with Dotun and tried to act as if I had been smart enough to figure things out by myself” (p230).

“Through Olamide and Sesan and Rotimi, I had been dangled from the edge of a precipice and I was now so weary that I wanted to be dropped” (p231).

“But the biggest lies are often the ones we tell ourselves. I bit my tongue because I did not want to ask questions. I did not ask questions because I did not want to know the answers” (p233).