Every Day Is for the Thief (Cole) - Book Reviews

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