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A Novel
by Nnedi Okorafor
Book Reviewed by:In this exhilarating tale by New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor, a disabled Nigerian American woman pens a wildly successful Sci-Fi novel, but as her fame rises, she loses control of the narrative—a surprisingly cutting, yet heartfelt drama about art and love, identity and connection, and, ultimately, what makes us human. This is a story unlike anything you've read before.
The future of storytelling is here.
Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing than a lucrative career in medicine or law, Zelu has always felt like the outcast of her large Nigerian family. Then her life is upended when, in the middle of her sister's lavish Caribbean wedding, she's unceremoniously fired from her university job and, to add insult to injury, her novel is rejected by yet another publisher. With her career and dreams crushed in one fell swoop, she decides to write something just for herself. What comes out is nothing like the quiet, literary novels that have so far peppered her unremarkable career. It's a far-future epic where androids and AI wage war in the grown-over ruins of human civilization. She calls it Rusted Robots.
When Zelu finds the courage to share her strange novel, she does not realize she is about to embark on a life-altering journey—one that will catapult her into literary stardom, but also perhaps obliterate everything her book was meant to be. From Chicago to Lagos to the far reaches of space, Zelu's novel will change the future not only for humanity, but for the robots who come next.
A book-within-a-book that blends the line between writing and being written, Death of the Author is a masterpiece of metafiction that manages to combine the razor-sharp commentary of Yellowface with the heartfelt humanity of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Surprisingly funny, deeply poignant, and endlessly discussable, this is at once the tale of a woman on the margins risking everything to be heard and a testament to the power of storytelling to shape the world as we know it.
Death of the Author is a novel full of possible avenues for discussion. There's its unusual structure, which includes not only the novel-within-a-novel but a series of interviews with Zelu's friends, lovers, and family members providing their own takes on events. Although largely taking place in Zelu's hometown of Chicago, Okorafor's novel is at its heart an African story, not only in Rusted Robots' Nigerian setting but also in Zelu's family dynamics, informed in large part by her immigrant parents, who come from different Nigerian ethnic groups and wildly different experiences of status and class. The question of what it means to live as an embodied person in the world is richly explored, both in the figure of Ankara the Hume and in Zelu's attitudes towards her physical disability...continued
Full Review
(664 words)
(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Nnedi Okorafor's Death of the Author includes an example of a type of metafiction known as an "embedded narrative"—in other words, the novel contains another novel (in this case a futuristic science fiction narrative) within its pages. This technique has been around for hundreds of years, in works like Shakespeare's Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream (both of which contain plays-within-plays) or One Thousand and One Nights, which consists of a framing story that encapsulates numerous shorter narratives.
In more recent years, contemporary novelists have employed embedded narratives as a way to inform, complicate, or expand their narratives, often using the novel-within-a-novel to interrogate the process of writing and the...
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George R. R. Martin, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Game of Thrones
Don't be frightened by the title. Nnedi Okorafor is fine… and doing her best work yet. Death of the Author reads like three novels in one, or maybe four, about fame and family, culture and change, the power of story, the writer's life… and robots. This one has it all.
