Book review: Every Day is for the Thief, by Teju Cole
The US-born Teju Cole was raised and educated in Nigeria. Open City, his 2011 book, won the PEN Faulkner Award. Every Day is for the Thief, his debut book, was first published in the African nation in 2007.
by Teju Cole
Random House
4 stars
Hector Tobar
The US-born Teju Cole was raised and educated in Nigeria. Open City, his 2011 book, won the PEN Faulkner Award. Every Day is for the Thief, his debut book, was first published in the African nation in 2007.
The book is billed as fiction, but it reads much more like a travelogue. It tells the story of an unnamed narrator's return to Africa after a decade away in the US, and it begins in a small patch of Nigeria on US soil: the Nigerian consulate in New York.
When the narrator insists on a receipt for the bribe that he has to pay at the consulate to get his passport, the official behind the counter asks: "Why trouble yourself? … Aren't you more interested in getting your passport than trying to prove a point?"
Reflecting on the question, the narrator writes: "Yes, but isn't it this casual complicity that has sunk our country so deep into its woes?"
Cole's narrator approaches just about everything in Lagos with emotional distance, as if he's trying to protect himself from his fraught native country. At times the book reads like an essay or an extended lament of Nigeria's woes.