In a penetrating stare through her new novel, a blistering page-turner entitled Dream Count , Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie goes for literary greatness. There is her usual lyricism, nuance and cadence. But she goes for something else even better. She is trying to do what all great writers have done — beyond style and plot — to go for something too subtle for words, conveying a lustre, naming the unnameable and concretising the abstract, pinning down the invisible and, in the process, discerning what Italo Calvino described as “the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.”
This is the territory of great writers like Marcel Proust, Nikolai Gogol, Stendhal, Jane Austen and others. These are writers who probe the depths of human nature and longings into the hidden undercurrents that run in a character’s psyche and also the currents that run between one person and another.
Addressing this, André Aciman writes, “It’s all a very tricky, shifty business, and sorting out this congested traffic of touch-and-go signals requires not just an observant cast of characters but a highly articulate and agile pen… This would become Proustian territory par excellence. Proust, like Austen, is meticulous when conveying these subliminal currents… What flows between one person and another is so provisional, so measureless, and so indiscernible that one might be tempted to borrow the words of the medieval poet William IX of Aquitaine and call these subliminal currents dreyt nien, ‘just nothing.’… writers like Jane Austen and Marcel Proust are clearly onto something… Their talent lies precisely in taking the manifold, ineffable flutters of intuition and pinning them down like struggling butterfly wings”.
Chimamanda tries to pin down “the butterfly wings” of ideal but unattainable dreams in Dream Count like when the character Chiamaka, a travel writer who lives in the USA, says, “I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being. Sometimes we live… with yearnings that we cannot name… it was during lockdown that I began to … give names to things long unnamed”.
Giving “names to things long unnamed” makes the author to probe into the unsuspected depths of pain in the characters. Chimamanda is going for things behind a half-opened door, things we know are there but are half-concealed, half-buried and things only half-felt by us and therefore half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which is still vague and in the abstract world of longing and desire.
Cover of the book ‘Dream Count’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Photo credit: Pool
The novel starts with the character Chiamaka during the Coronavirus pandemic lockdown — with sorrowful wistfulness — as she reflects on her past relationships “that form part of her ‘dream count,’ a personal tally of her quest for perfect love”. In this count, the mathematics shows that the balance sheet is not in Chiamaka’s favour.
Chiamaka describes the pandemic period: “The news frightened me. I read of old women and old men dying alone, as if unloved, while the people who loved them stood weeping behind glass screens… I mourned the loss of strangers”. And she is not alone. Her best friend, Zikora, is a lawyer who has enjoyed success in everything until she is betrayed and broken-hearted. Chiamaka’s cousin, Omelogor, a rich lady in Nigeria begins to question her identity. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America but is facing struggles of her own.
The novel is about these four women who are successful but each of them has a special struggle with loneliness that’s like a misdiagnosed and persistent illness — an accumulation of multiple symptoms into a single affliction. With successive losses in love and relationships, life is like a broken pledge, a promise not kept.
Even family members are dispersed. During the pandemic, people couldn’t visit each other. As a character laments, “On Zoom calls, everyone echoed, reaching but not touching, the distance between us all further hollowed out”. Communicating through screens makes intimacy even more fleeting and unattainable. Chiamaka says, “We spoke on Zoom every other day — my parents in Enugu, my brother Afam in Lagos, and his twin Bunachi in London… At the end of each Zoom call, I felt lonelier than before… To talk was to remember all that was lost. I dreamed of hugging my mother in the anteroom of our home in Enugu...”
This is one of the things that makes Dream Count feel relatable since Zoom permeates our lives and Chimamanda has brought it expertly to literature. Chiamaka realises that she is not only lonely but also growing old. The joke on social media today is that it’s funny to be the same age as old people. Chiamaka says, “I one day found a gray hair on my head… I thought: I’m growing old… Where have all the years gone?”
“Where have all the years gone?” we all wonder as we grow older, towards that age where someone joked that “everything in one’s body hurts and what doesn’t hurt doesn’t work”. Dr James Dobson says that for men, “the frustrating thing about aging is that hair won’t grow on the top (of the head), but it sprouts abundantly in the nose and ears”. Whether it’s Chiamaka or a man in Nairobi, Chimamanda reminds us to count our dreams and to remember that time flies. Let’s make good use of our time.
