Eunhae Han’s Reviews > Americanah > Status Update

was attrac-tive, the kind of attractiveness that grew on you. She liked him. He reached out often to push his glasses up, a small push with his fin-ger, and she thought this endearing. As they lay naked on her bed, all pleasant and all warm, she wished it were different. If only she could feel what she wanted to feel

any Nigerian food?*
Obinze got up abruptly and went into the bathroom. He called Ifemelu and felt himself getting enraged when she still did not pick up.
He blamed her. He blamed her for making him a person who was not entirely in control of what he was feeling.

My ex-boyfriends and I spent a lot of time explaining. I sometimes wondered whether we would even have anything at all to say to each other if we were from the same place," and it pleased him to hear that, because it gave his relationship with her a depth, a lack of trifling novelty. They were from the same place and they still had a lot to say to each other.

They were standing by the bookshelf and laughing about how often his mother had tried to get him to read the book. And then they were standing by the bookshelf and kissing. A gentle kiss at first, lips pressed to lips, then their tongues were touching and she felt boneless against him. He pulled away first.

Later, as they walked into Aunty Onenu's office, Doris ahead, wearing a loose-fitting blue pinafore and black square-heeled mary janes, Zemaye asked Ifemelu, "Why does Doris wear rubbish to work?
She looks like she is cracking a joke with her clothes."

The room was dense with awkwardness, and Ifemelu, as though to dilute it, once again examined her hair in the mirror, patting it lightly as she turned this way and that.

sorry."
"Why?" He was looking at her as though she had reached in and torn away his innocence, and for a moment she hated him, this man who ate her apple cores and turned even that into something of a moral act.

happen."
"That's the actual tragedy," femelu said, and realized she was using Blaine's own words; sometimes she heard in her voice the echo of his.
The actual tragedy of Emmett Till, he had told her once, was not the murder of a black child for whistling at a white woman but that some black people thought: But why did you whistle?

She felt withered in his wordless rage. How could principle, an abstract thing floating in the air, wedge itself so solidly between them, and turn Blaine into somebody else? She wished it were an uncivil emotion, a passion like jealousy or betrayal.

Shan.
"We are very ideological about fiction in this country. If a character is not familiar, then that character becomes unbelievable," Shan said.
"You can't even read American fiction to get a sense of how actual life is lived these days. You read American fiction to learn about dysfunctional white folk doing things that are weird to normal white folks."