Every Day Is for the Thief
Teju Cole, 2014
Random House
176 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812985856
Summary
For readers of J. M. Coetzee and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Every Day Is for the Thief is Teju Cole’s second novel, following his critically acclaimed debut, Open City—winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and named one of the best books of the year by more than twenty publications.
Fifteen years is a long time to be away from home. It feels longer still because I left under a cloud.
A young Nigerian living in New York City goes home to Lagos for a short visit, finding a city both familiar and strange. In a city dense with story, the unnamed narrator moves through a mosaic of life, hoping to find inspiration for his own. He witnesses the "yahoo yahoo" diligently perpetrating email frauds from an Internet cafe, longs after a mysterious woman reading on a public bus who disembarks and disappears into a bookless crowd, and recalls the tragic fate of an eleven-year-old boy accused of stealing at a local market.
Along the way, the man reconnects with old friends, a former girlfriend, and extended family, taps into the energies of Lagos life—creative, malevolent, ambiguous—and slowly begins to reconcile the profound changes that have taken place in his country and the truth about himself.
In spare, precise prose that sees humanity everywhere, interwoven with original photos by the author, Every Day Is for the Thief is a wholly original amalgamation of fiction, memory, art, and travel writing.
Originally published in Nigeria in 2007, this revised and updated edition is the first time this unique book has been available outside Africa. You've never read a book like Every Day Is for the Thief because no one writes like Teju Cole. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 27, 1975
• Where—U.S.
• Raised—Nigeria
• Education—B.A., Kalamazoo College; M.A., University of London; M.Phil.,
Columbia University
• Awards—Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award; International Literature
Award (for the German transl.)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Teju Cole is a Nigerian-American writer, photographer, and art historian, best known for his 2011 novel, Open City. For that work, Cole won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.
Biography and work
Cole was born in the United States to Nigerian parents, raised in Nigeria, and moved back to the United States at the age of 17. He received his Bachelor's from Kalamazoo College, an M.A. from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and his M.Phil. from Columbia University.
He is the author of Every Day is for the Thief, a novella published in 2007 in Nigeria and in 2014 in the U.S. His anovel, Open City was published in 2011.
Cole lives in Brooklyn, New York City, and is currently the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. He is also writer in residence of the Literaturhaus Zurich from June to November, 2014. Cole is a regular contributor to publications including the New York Times, Qarrtsiluni, Granta, New Yorker, Transition, New Inquiry, and A Public Space. He is currently at work on a book-length non-fiction narrative of Lagos, and on "Small Fates." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/16/2014.)
Book Reviews
[A] book of taut peregrinations…Mr. Cole's novels assume the shape of travel writing, and they are sly commentaries on the genre. They are also dense with travel writing's pleasures, with sharp, sudden observation…his novels are lean, expertly sustained performances. The places he can go, you feel, are just about limitless. The story [Cole] tells here is just about the most primal one, "an inquiry into what it was I longed for all those times I longed for home.
New York Times - Dwight Garner
Cole constructs a narrative of fragments, a series of episodes that he allows to resonate, interspersing them with photographs. A less stylish writer would have become bogged down by the demands of narrative, spelling out the narrator's relationships with his family and friends in a way that Every Day Is for the Thief deftly avoids. Cole places his narrator in fleeting situations where the fault lines in his identity are most likely to crack open.
New York Times Book Review - Hari Kunzru
[Teju] Cole is following in a long tradition of writerly walkers who, in the tradition of Baudelaire, make their way through urban spaces on foot and take their time doing so. Like Alfred Kazin, Joseph Mitchell, J. M. Coetzee, and W. G. Sebald (with whom he is often compared), Cole adds to the literature in his own zeitgeisty fashion.
Boston Globe
[A] tightly focused but still marvelously capacious little novel...built with cool originality.... The house of literature [Cole] is busy creating is an in-between space with fluid dimensions, resisting entrenchment.
Christian Science Monitor
very Day Is for the Thief holds something for people with all levels of familiarity with Nigeria. It is an introduction and a provocation, a beautifully simple portrait and a nuanced examination. It invites you to steal a glimpse of Lagos.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A worthy precursor and, in a way, a companion piece to Cole’s highly acclaimed Open City.... Cole’s narrator is compelling—someone with whom you want to spend time ambling, looking and chatting. I was happy to be along for the journey.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Omnivorous and mesmerizing.... [I]t is a pleasure to be in [the narrator’s] company.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Beautifully written.... The Lagos presented here teems with stories.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
A luminous rumination on storytelling and place, exile and return.... [E]xtraordinary.
San Francisco Chronicle
Direct and bracing, a short, sharp counterpunch to those who seek to romanticise Africa.
Telegraph (UK)
Rich imagery and sharp prose...widely praised as one of the best fictional depictions of Africa in recent memory.
New Yorker
very Day Is for the Thief is unapologetically a novel of ideas: a diagnosis of the systemic corruption in Cole’s native Lagos and of corruption’s psychological effects. But, remarkably, the book avoids any of the chunkiness that usually accompanies such work. Emotional and intellectual life are woven too tightly together. The ideas make the character and vice versa.
New Republic
Every Day Is for the Thief is a testament to [Nigeria’s] power to inspire.
Vanity Fair
Excellently crafted.... Optimism regarding the future of [Nigeria] pulsates steadily . . . through [Every Day Is for the Thief].
Huffington Post
[Cole] revels in ambiguity, taking inspiration from authors who have toyed with what a novel can be, like W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee and V. S. Naipaul.... There is a touch of Alfred Kazin and Joseph Mitchell—two of the most observant walkers in [New York City’s] history—in his books’ open-eyed flaneurs.
New York Observer
This pared-down writing style comes at the cost of character development.... The structure is loose, a collection of observances of daily life in Lagos in which Cole presents the complexities of culture and poverty....but it's his willingness to explore so many uncomfortable paradoxes that sears this narrative into our brains.
Publishers Weekly
After living in America for 15 years, a Nigerian writer returns to his homeland. Reunited with a beloved aunt, with whom he stays, he reconnects with a boyhood friend, now a struggling doctor, and visits the woman who was his first love, now married with a daughter, as he contemplates staying in Lagos. But he is struck by the omnipresent corruption, as officials at all levels, including police and soldiers, supplement often meager wages with bribes. He sees thieving “area boys” all around, Internet-scamming “yahoo yahoo” in cyber cafes, a jazz shop practicing piracy, and a national museum gone to ruin, its artifacts ill-maintained and its historical presentations inaccurate. Yet in addition to scoring high in corruption, Nigeria’s claim to fame is that it is the most religious country in the world and its people the happiest. This novella, a revised version of the first book written by Nigerian Cole, author of the acclaimed Open City (2011), is a scathing but loving look at his native land in measured, polished prose. —Michele Leber
Booklist
A Nigerian living in the U.S. finds corruption, delight and ghosts on a return visit to Lagos in this rich, rougher-edged predecessor to Cole's celebrated debut novel (Open City, 2011). First published in Nigeria in 2007, this novella records the unnamed narrator's impressions of the city he left 13 years earlier. His observations range from comic to bitterly critical, playing off memories of growing up in Lagos and his life abroad. Cole paints brisk scenes that convey the dangers and allure of the "gigantic metropolis" in prose that varies from plain to almost poetic to overwrought. The narrator says a woman holding a book by Michael Ondaatje "makes my heart leap up into my mouth and thrash about like a catfish in a bucket." Bribe-hungry police, a vibrant street market, perilous bus rides, brazen home invaders: From the locally commonplace emerge sharp contrasts with the West. Coming to the market, for instance, he recalls an 11-year-old boy burned alive for petty theft. In the city's many new Internet cafes, a "sign of the newly vital Nigerian economy," teens write emails to perpetrate the "advance fee fraud" for which the country has become infamous. The returnee laments the dilapidation and skewed historical record of the National Museum before admiring the world-class facilities of the Musical Society of Nigeria Centre. It's a graphic contrast that billboards questions bedeviling the narrator: Why did I leave? Should I return for good? What have I gained? Or lost? Such an exile's catechism could serve with slight variations the many displaced people Cole writes of in the "open city" of New York. And as with the novel, the influence of W.G. Sebald arises again here, not least in Cole's addition of photographs that are much like the novella's prose: uneven yet often evocative.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, use these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Every Day Is for the Thief:
1. The narrator finds on his return to Nigeria that to survive in his country, one must have "the will to be violent, a will that has to be available when it is called for." What does he witness that prompts him to make such an observation? Talk about what it means to live with the potential for violence and how it affects the human soul...and the collective "soul" of the nation's culture.
2. Cole derives the title of his book from the Yoruban proverb,"Every day is for the thief, but one day is for the owner." Why does he use the proverb as the title of his book...and why only the first part?
3. When he comes upon the scammers in the internet cafe, the narrator believes that the swindled and swindler deserve one another. Why does he feel that way...and do you agree or disagree? In what way are the yahoo-yahoos indicative of the Nigerian culture?
4. In what way, is Nigeria, as the narrator says, "a hostile environment for the life of the mind"? How important are debates and "contradictory voices" to intellectual vibrancy?
5. After a dispiriting visit to the National Museum, the narrator wonders what the "social consequences [are] of life in a country that has no use for history." How important is an understanding of history? And whose history gets told? Do U.S. citizens have an understanding of their national history?
6. How would you describe daily life in Lagos—its culture, poverty, and corruption?
7. Talk about whether or not Cole's pared down writing style and episodic structure lessens the novel's ability to flesh out its characters. Are any of his characters fully developed? Or is character exploration not his purpose?
8. What affect do the photos have on your reading of this novel? Why does Cole use them? Does he over-rely on the photos? Do they enhance or detract from his narrative?
9. The narrator tells us that this story is "an inquiry into what it was I longed for all those times I longed for home," which brings to mind the Thomas Wolfe title "You Can't Go Home Again." Does the narrator find what he has longed for? What has he found...or not found?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)