Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju ColeRandom House, 2014

If you’re looking for a novel that’s plot-driven or character driven, Every Day Is for the Thief (which was originally published in Nigeria in 2007, by Cassava Republic Press) is probably not the book for you. This is an episodic novel, a novel of vignettes and moments, a novel where the city of Lagos (which appears in photos by the author, interspersed with the text) is perhaps more vivid a character than the nameless narrator (a dual citizen of the US and Nigeria who travels to Lagos from New York to visit family). Cole’s prose is graceful: an airplane “drops gently and by degrees toward the earth, as if progressing down an unseen flight of stairs” (9). And Lagos is vivid, from the airport on: “The entrances are clogged with passengers’ relatives and, in far greater numbers, touts, hustlers, and all sorts of people who are there because they have nowhere else to be” (10).

The narrator moves through the city, noticing how it works, or doesn’t: the official at the airport who asks for money, the man who opens a shop door and asks for a tip, the woman in begging in the parking lot, the young unemployed “area boys” who attempt theft, the policemen by a roundabout collecting bribes “under a billboard that reads “Corruption Is Illegal: Do Not Give or Accept Bribes” (15). He visits Internet cafes and watches scammers typing advance fee fraud letters (like the policemen, under a sign forbidding it): I love this passage:

Once, looking to my right in an Internet cafe—and this surreptitious reading quickly becomes habitual for me—I see a letter being written from the “Chairman of the National Office of Petroleum Resources.” The writer is a rough-looking man who is clearly chairman of nothing. There are other letters, from the heirs of fictional magnates, from the widows of oil barons, from the legal representatives of incarcerated generals, and they are such enterprising samples of narrative fiction that I realize Lagos is a city of Scheherazades. The stories unfold in ever more fanciful iterations and, as in the myth, those who tell the best stories are richly rewarded. (27)

The narrator wants to experience Lagos: its markets, its streets. He takes public transit even though his aunt and uncle discourage him from it: “There is no better place to make an inquiry into what it was I longed for all those times I longed for home,” the narrator thinks, as he moves through a crowded bus terminal (35). And then, in one of those perfect city moments, there’s a woman on the minibus reading Michael Ondaatje, one of his favorite authors: it’s a surprise to see someone reading literary fiction on Lagosian public transit, and he wonders about the woman, thinks maybe he’ll talk to her, but doesn’t get a chance to:

The bus crosses from Yaba over the Third Mainland Bridge into Lagos Island. In the shadow of skyscrapers, half-nude men in dugouts cast nets into the lagoon. The work of arms and shoulders. I think of Auden’s line: Poetry makes nothing happen. The bus comes to a stop. She disembarks, at Obalende, with her book, and quickly vanishes into the bookless crowd. (43)

The narrator is a solitary walker, moving alone through the city “to observe its many moods: the lethargy of the early mornings, the raucous early evenings, the silent, lightless nights, cut through with the sounds of generators” (128). “It is in this aimless wandering that I find myself truly in the city,” he says, and then, later: “letting go of my moorings makes me connect to the city as pure place, through which I move without prejudging what I will see when I come around a corner” (128, 159). The descriptions of those wanderings, with their lovely and unlovely moments (a market where a boy was burned to death, a museum that doesn’t match the narrator’s memory of it, coffins that the narrator initially mistakes for boats) combine with snippets of conversation, pieces of days, and the result is really satisfying.


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