Funmi Iyanda

This book I hear started as a blog, it must be the best blog I never read. The author Teju Cole has an incredible gift of observation,description and eventual expression without judgement or pretension.

In story after story he deftly lifts you up and slams you down in an unwaveringly accurate mutation of the realities of our existence. Not since Frank McCourts' first timer Pulitzer winning book Angela's Ashes have I read stories whose esu odaraic (Yoruba deity) character makes you want to laugh and cry simultaneously written in simple, powerful discerningly honest prose. I read everyday without pausing for breath and emerged satiated that someone has written a book that accurately reflects the tragedy and triumphs of Lagos, a mean task if you know how complex this city is. As Cole noted, the paradox of Lagos is that in her unusual realities, she is a deep dense forest of creative resource for the writer or any other art form but the brutality of her being robs the creative of the energy to tap into this huge mainly virgin forest. Teju Cole's ability to stand in the midst of it, absorb it, process it and regurgitate it is truly admirable and a must read.

Lagos always reminds me of that cheesy collaboration between the late Pavarotti and Celine Dion. My favourite lines are "I try to run away from you but if l were to leave you l would die". There is a certain futility in trying to completely remove one's Nigerian soul wherever one may live, those who have most succeeded that l have seen always have a zomboid nothingness to them. The other line is the chorus, "I love you then I hate you then I love you then I hate you then I love you more".

This Teju Cole succinctly expresses at the end of the story on the national museum and the muson centre both at Onikan. "Each time l am sure that in returning to Lagos I have inadvertently wandered into a region of hell, something else emerges to give me hope. A reader, an orchestra, the friendship of some powerful swimmers against the tide". One of my stabilizing factors is the fact that l make it my business to know, befriend and document some of those swimmers against the tide and so for the next three days l will tell you stories of some of them. In the mean time, buy, steal, beg or borrow and read EVERYDAY IS FOR THE THIEF. Ask Jeremy and Bibi (naijablog) how to get it.