Every Day Is for the Thief

 

Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A beautifully written novel with no real plot. A Nigerian raised in Lagos, now living in New York, goes back to Lagos after fifteen years. Most chapters tell vinaigrettes of ways that the people of Lagos steal, or are stolen from, both from systemic corruption, brutal poverty, ineptitude, governmental abuse, lethargic economy, etc. Pictures are sprinkled without which gives the novel a memoir-like fee, though I'm not sure I really liked the protagonist (angry and self-righteous). The observations and descriptions are eloquent and thought-provoking though, and makes it a must-read.

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Precisely because everyone takes a shortcut, nothing works and, for this reason, the only way to get anything done is to take another shortcut.

Power comes back at 4: 00 A.M. or later. The fan resumes its spinning like a broken conversation continued in mid-sentence.

There is a disconnect between the wealth of stories available here and the rarity of creative refuge.

What, I wonder, are the social consequences of life in a country that has no use for history?

This is a secret only because no one wants to know about it.

But it is as yet a borrowed progress and it is happening in the absence of the ideological commitments that can make it real.

in Nigeria, there is tremendous cultural pressure to claim that one is happy, even when one is not. Especially when one is not. Unhappy people, such as grieving mothers at a protest march, are swept aside. It is wrong to be unhappy. But it is not necessary to get bogged down in details when all we need is the general idea.

The idea that saying makes it so, that the laws of the imagination matter more than all others.

afraid that I will bind to film what is intended only for the memory, what is meant only for a sidelong glance followed by forgetting.