... achingly of its time ... I really appreciated Adichie’s discomfort with the language of grief ... Books often come to you just when you need them, and it is unimaginable to think just how many people have, like the author, lost someone in this singularly strange period of our history. Adichie’s father didn’t die from COVID-19, but that doesn’t make the aftermath of that loss any less relevant ... A book on grief is not the kind of book you want to have to give to anyone. But here we are.
... slim, poignant ... Any one of us who have lost loved ones — even that euphemism feels deficient, for we have not lost anyone; we know too well what happened to them — can relate to Adichie’s anger and her compulsion to reshape it into guilt ... The loveliest writing in this reflection, however, is not about James Nwoye Adichie, but about the anguish and longing his death produces in those who suffer his absence most acutely.
The narrative interrupts itself, brings us up short, as Adichie is brought up short by the realisation that he is gone. This realisation sneaks up on her in sometimes unexpected ways, through the innocent questions of her four-year-old daughter, or through the fact of a death being sent out into the world by text, or in print, and made real ... Notes on Grief continues, in 30 short, lucid chapters, for 90 pages. It will not delay you long, but what it leaves will stay with you, like figures caught in a strobe light, lined up so closely that you can jump from one to another with a jolt that captures the jerkiness of the hours and days and weeks that follow the detonation ... Most of all I liked having a companion, rather than a guide, who didn’t try to advise me how to grieve properly but told me what it is like.
This small book, intensely personal, is a new exercise in vulnerability ... In Notes on Grief, by turns fierce, tender and raw, [Adichie] reveals a more private self ... This is a cathartic work for Adichie, a way to keep alive the spirit of her father by telling his stories. And in her writing, he shines as a man of deep kindness and integrity, a dry wit and successful academic who was unstinting in his support of his daughter’s ambitions.
... visceral ... lays a path by which we might mourn our individual traumas among the aggregate suffering of this harrowing time. Our guide, Adichie, is uncloaked, full of 'wretched, roaring rage,' teaching us within the space of this work how to gather our disparate selves and navigate the still-raging pandemic. In doing this, she tells a global story of this moment, while mapping how her writerly voice, in particular, came to be ... 'You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language,' she writes. Artists have tried this wrangling forever, in various mediums and states of composure. But we are better off under Adichie’s strain ... this intimate work implores, jerks us out of callousness, moves grief closer, right under our noses: Death and dying are still everywhere ... Adichie knows to train her eye on what lingers ... In the texture of many of these sentences you can almost feel where the writer has resisted bearing down with her refining tools — language and memory — so as to allow her emotional reality to remain splintered and sharp ... Naming, Adichie knows, is a powerful inheritance, and a summoning. Some of the most affecting moments are when the author uses her native tongue to call her father by various nicknames ... It is hard not to wish for more from Adichie, to know how she might contend with this loss over time, but what we have here will have to be enough for now. She is, in this work, 'callow and unformed,' and that may be the point ... Over the course of these 30 fragments, we witness a shift in perspective, an assurance that whatever comes next will never have been created before. This may be true of Adichie’s work just as it may be true of where we all find ourselves in days to come.
... the final chapter is a deft triumph of linguistic contradiction ... grief is sensation, and Adichie gives an eloquent account of how it hurts: the air turns to glue as she gasps at it, her sides ache, she cries with her tired muscles. She has a bitter tongue, a weight on her chest, her insides are dissolving. Grief is in her flesh and muscles and organs; she is eyeball to eyeball to it, so close she cannot make out its shape ... At the same time – language groping after language – she picks up and then discards a series of different metaphors, over and over again saying the same thing (no no no no): her father’s death is an undoing, an unravelling, a solidifying, a drowning, a scattering of selfhood; she is in the centre of a violent churning and she is on the outside of her self, looking in and calling herself 'you' ... a moving account of a daughter’s sorrow and it is also a love letter to the one who has gone. Adichie wants him back; she wants to rescue him from death and to tell him once again how much she adored him. She is saying don’t go and she is saying goodbye and she is also saying sorry – for the writing of grief is to acknowledge an ending and, thus, as Jacques Derrida had it, as soon as you write, you are asking for forgiveness.
Each of its 30 short sections reads like a stream of consciousness, scribbled randomly in notebooks and on the backs of envelopes, trying to make sense of the nonsensical. With raw eloquence, Adichie’s observations have, simultaneously, an academic detachment and an inescapable anguish at being 'in the centre of this churning' ... Though brief, Notes on Grief is, at times, a remarkably but necessarily uncomfortable read, because existing inside of that churning is inherently uncomfortable, unbearable ... Her words put a welcome, authentic voice to this most universal of emotions, which is also one of the most universally avoided ... Notes on Grief is both achingly personal and stunningly familiar to anyone who has felt that scattering. Some passages might seem redundant, but so is grief, so viciously efficient in its elasticity ... the point of Notes on Grief seems to be that loss becomes something we must live with, if we indeed want to continue living.
Adichie does not reach for a narrative. She cannot force sense on the senseless. She writes diary-style (but deeply crafted) entries about the violence of loss ... For fans of the famously private Adichie — she deferred news that she had become a mother until well after the birth — this is fascinatingly intimate. It is also delivered in the most readable, tender bites for any of the many of us whose attention has been shot by the harrowing of this past year.
... what is most memorable in this tribute is Adichie’s father’s love for his family and their enduring love for him ... A raw, moving account of mourning and loss, Adichie’s memoir reminds us there is no right or wrong way to grieve and that celebrating life every day is the best way to honor our loved ones.
... one of our century's most gifted artists of language makes visceral the experience of death and grieving. In poetic bursts of imagistic prose that mirror the fracturing of self after the death of a beloved parent, Adichie constructs a narrative of mourning — of haunting and of love ... Reflecting upon moments of her father's life in vivid, richly saturated details allows some comfort ... A daughter's love and respect for a father who was pivotal in her formation of self saturates these pages ... becomes a work larger than its slim size, universal in the experience of the loss of a parent, and the struggle to mourn that loss, during a pandemic when airport closures and social distancing push funerals months and months past their scheduled dates. Of not knowing when the funeral will be, the delaying again, and then again ... Perhaps, in the reading of this book, in this personal lament made universal, so too will the rest of us who have lost so much over this past year of loss and grieving.
... a direct response to early grief – fast, raw and immediate. It explores the first months of pain and processing, yet overflowing in the text, served in equal measure, is love ... It feels raw, even for a book about grief. Some wait years to preserve these thoughts; Adichie is examining them now, constantly stepping into her grief and then, with the same feet, twisting away again to look at herself and examine what is happening to her ... The observations are sharp but it is not uncomfortable; her grief is hard, sad, full of rage and laughter – as all grief is. My heart broke at her fear of her mother dying ... It is no salve for her own grief, but Adichie’s brave observance of her own pain, will be a gift to those also suffering their first year of loss in these strange times.
... both emotional and austere, a work of dignity and of unravelling. Spare and yet spiritually nutritious, the book serves as a reflection of Adichie’s turmoil in loss. It is also an exquisitely written tribute to her father, James Nwoye Adichie, who was Nigeria’s first professor of statistics : his self-effacement, sense of calm and wry humour shine through.
... brief but deeply poignant ... While there is deep sadness in each brief chapter, there is also comfort in how accurately Adichie captures the tense and overwhelming times that follow shortly after a loss ... A worthwhile mediation on coming to terms with grief. Especially as we continue to reckon with loss, this reflective account will be valuable to the many people unexpectedly grieving from afar.
In less than 70 pages, she grapples with her pain and chaos of grief, pays beautiful tribute to her father, and moves herself to be able to write about him in the past tense ... Adichie, with a narrative strength and a graceful style, moves from universal concerns like the inadequacies of pat condolences to the specifics of her father’s life and love ... This book is a personal record of this burden, this pain, and her attempt to hold it --- as if holding some part of her father --- even as she inevitably comes to terms with his death ... a candid exploration of a relatable loss. Adichie articulates her confusion and sorrow, her moments of unexpected peace sparked by memory, with an aching honesty and gorgeous prose. This is a book to read and revisit.
... deeply etched testimony ... Shock, rage, and pain—physical and psychic—are built into the stronghold of her syntax ... Adichie’s exquisitely forthright chronicle of grief generously articulates the harrowing amplification of sorrow, helplessness, and loss during the COVID-19 pandemic, making this an intimate and essential illumination of a tragic time.
Though she made me understand and even feel the hollow space left by her father’s absence, more than anything, Notes on Grief gave me a sense of untrammeled joy. Here is a family that truly loves one another and delights in each other’s company. What greater gift in life can there be? Yes, Adichie is left to mourn what has been taken from her, but she has also given readers a taste of the happiness that many spend a lifetime seeking and never find.
... an eloquent dirge ... One of the engaging things about the book is that most of the anecdotes and jokes Adichie tells to bring her father back to life are not very funny. They are to real jokes as family snapshots are to professional photographs, and yet they work beautifully to conjure up the absence ... There is much wisdom in this short book, including the hard truth that grief is the price we pay for attachment.
This is a lyrical, moving journal in 30 entries ... Adichie’s poignant lyricism flows probably from her view of grief as something that can also be ‘a celebration of love’. The love for her father gives her the courage to see her own pain without blinkers. She is not a Hamlet seeking solace in metaphysical speculation. Tears do not dim her sight. When emotion threatens her sanity, she turns to writing, as Hamlet does to acting. It is a performance and affords distance to survive grief’s onslaught. At one level then, the book is a set of variations on mourning performed in language to keep madness at bay. At another, it is a baptism of grief that draws the writer so far out into the wilderness of language that she senses a self-birthing: she hears ‘a new voice pushing itself out of my writing’. The voice has the urgency of death’s summons. It dawns on her that she too is mortal and may die, like her father did, any moment. And so she ‘must write everything now’. With this realisation, she has won the writer’s last freedom.
