![]() ![]() Okparanta also opens with her protagonist describing her home in Africa. Those opening pages of Out of Africa are a sensory immersion, and the country of Kenya is as important a character in her story as any man or woman she introduces later in the narrative. And say what you want about Dinesen – her politics, her character, her ability to run a farm – she could write. In the paragraphs that immediately follow Dinesen goes on to to describe the topography, the weather and the sounds of her home in Kenya. That is not Okparanta, but the famous opening lines of Isak Dinesen’s (or, if you prefer, Karen Blixen’s) Out of Africa. The equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet… ![]() I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Nigerian writer Chinelo Okparanta’s debut novel, Under the Udala Trees, does this from the first page… actually from the very first sentence. No writer wants the defining trait of his or her novel to be that it reminds critics and readers of other best-selling and/or critically acclaimed novels. ![]()
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