And every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. I didn’t have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. Vivek tells us, “I’m not what anyone thinks I am. This storytelling tool might feel like a cudgel in the hands of a less skillful writer but Emezi employs it like a dainty paintbrush, gently and sparingly. Vivek’s life unfurls in a series of flashbacks - boys on bikes, SAT prep classes, military school - punctuated by occasional interjections from beyond the grave. Neither does her husband, brother-in-law or sister-in-law, whose fellow church members attempt a “deliverance” to flog the “demon” out of Vivek. The reader understands that Vivek’s long hair and lipstick are clues to something Kavita doesn’t have words to discuss. He could be your son or your brother you wouldn’t be surprised if he belched when he put down his bowl.Įmezi’s steamroller of a story is about what Vivek’s family doesn’t see - or doesn’t want to see - while he is alive, and whether or not that blindness contributes to his death. You know what’s coming - it’s right there in the title - but you still hold out hope that Vivek will stay home, safe with his mom. If you’ve loved, lived with or had breakfast with a young man of a certain age, you can picture the scene: the vulnerable column of Vivek’s neck as he tips his head back, the bob of his Adam’s apple as he gulps. That act of putting nourishment into his body - it was such an alive thing to do.” Kavita remembered every second of it as if she was back at the table with him: the last time she would ever watch her child feed himself.

(Hours later, she will find his broken body on her welcome mat.)Įmezi writes, “Of course he picked out his three cubes of sugar, let them dissolve into the milk of course he ate the cornflakes quickly - he’d never liked them soggy - then tipped the bowl to his mouth and drank the sweetened milk. It’s the moment when a grieving mother looks back on her son’s final meal at home. There are many moving passages in Akwaeke Emezi’s third novel, THE DEATH OF VIVEK OJI (Riverhead, 256 pp., $27), but one sticks with me.

The death of vivek oji a novel