The Baltimore Online Book Club: A Brief Review of "Purple Hibiscus" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Purple Hibiscus
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Algonquin Books pf Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, N.C. 2012
307 pages

For this month’s edition of the Baltimore Online Book Club, we chose to read and discuss Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—a wise choice!  The book met with wide acclaim when it was first published in 2003—praise (of which some of us were unaware until after we read it) undoubtedly well deserved.  It is a page-turner which we highly recommend to anyone who hasn’t read it yet.

Adichie is a born story-teller.  If you want a novel replete with Melvillian asides or with Proustian profundities, look elsewhere; if you want to read a winsome, well-wrought novel, however, look no further than here.  The language is functional; it's like a train that neither chugs along noisily nor progresses in splendor, but takes you where she wants you to go, from one's home to another's, with many memorable scenes along the way. She knows well how to structure a story.  She might not be a master of characterization such as Philip Roth is, but many of the characters in the novel are quite memorable nevertheless.  This is a coming-of-age novel about a fifteen year-old girl growing up in a rich, tyrannical, patriarchal family in Enugu, Nigeria, where, probably not incidentally, Adichie was born as well.

The symbol of the purple hibiscus, a hybrid plant, is central to the novel—it represents a new kind of freedom for the main character, Kambili Achike, and her seventeen year old brother, Jaja.  The plant is described on page 16 as follows: "Aunty Ifeoma’s experimental purple hibiscus: rare, fragrant with undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do.”  Adichie treats this central symbol with admirable understatement; it is mentioned once again when Aunt Ifeoma, a humanities professor at the Nigerian University at Nsukka, informs Kambali that the purple hibiscus has been cultivated for the first time by the university’s botany department.  Adichie seems to be saying that freedom will come to Nigeria from the centers of learning; it is  much-needed liberation.  The author does not hide the widespread corruption in her country.  As one might have expected, the plant thrives in the family compound after the siblings obtain their hard-won independence.

I really enjoyed the Nigerian ambiance, which reminded me of time spent in India. So many superficial resemblances: before food processors came to India, the sounds of pestles grinding lentils in mortars could be heard everywhere, just as they were in Nigeria at the time the novel takes place.  Adichie refers to frequent power shortages—I remember waking up many times in the middle of the night during very hot weather after the electricity failed.  (This occurs infrequently in India now).  There was no televisions in the Nigerian households at the time of the novel,, just as in 1970s India.  Now, televised Bollywood movies and local-language versions of India Has Got Talent blares from living rooms everywhere—just as in this digital age with its remarkable innovations,  the good, alas! comes with the bad.

The novel occurs in Igbo country, the Igbo people are a significant ethnic group of Nigeria, consisting of about 20% of the population.  Adichie includes many Igbo-language phrases in the book, which she usually subsequently translated—an example: ”Nna m o! My Father!”—page 183.  Nigerian food is frequently mentioned as well, e.g.”Lunch was fufu and onugbu soup.”—page 11. (I asked my son, a good cook,who has a Nigerian friend, to make it for me—He has so far refused; he thinks I won’t like it.  Fufu, made of yam, he tells me,is  like bread, which you dip into the soup.  How could anyone not be interested in something called fufu? It sounds like a name of a chic Park Avenue poodle—why shouldn’t fufu taste as good as a primped doggy looks? Another aside: when Philip's friend visited, I played the Nigerian National Anthem at the piano, the music for which I found on the internet--an indication of how much the atmosphere of the novel has affected me).

Adichie by these means and others creates a riveting story with a distinctive Nigerian atmosphere; this she accomplishes with aplomb.  This vividly written novel makes you almost feel part of the family; things are very different here, she seems to relate, yet everything is the same nevertheless.  This local, yet very universal coming-of-age novel, is a delight.


This is the eleventh edition of the Baltimore Online Book Club. You are welcome to read past book reviews of the Baltimore Online Book Club by googling the title of the novel along with my full name, Thomas Dorsett.

1. The New Life by Orhan Pamuk
2..Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
4. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
5. Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan
6. Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Pierre or the Ambiguities by Herman Melville
8. Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
9. Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed

10,The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa

Our next meeting will take place on January 31,, 2018.  On that date, the seven members of our group will discuss ,"Diary of a Polar Bear," ("Etüden im Schnee") by Yoko Tawada, I will post my reviews, in English and in German, shorty thereafter. You are invited to read the book and to post your comments onto the comment section of the review.   I wish you pleasurable reading!