by Jane Bennett
“I’m very fascinated by the idea that it takes a certain kind of madness to overthrow the status quo and to bring about change. That’s why I love that... commercial, ‘Here’s to the Crazy Ones’” (Imbolo Mbue, in conversation with Rachel Barenbaum, 2021).
How Beautiful We Were, the second novel by Imbolo Mbue, who was born in Cameroon, was published in 2021. Reviewing work written four years ago might seem odd, as reviews usually take place fairly immediately after publication. Indeed, in 2021 and 2022, many reviews celebrated Mbue’s “sweeping and quietly devastating novel” (El Akkad 2021). Most of these were Northern (Mbue lives in New York) and the book was heralded in the New York Times as one of the 10 best novels of 2021. Writing with some awe, reviewer El Akkad eulogised Mbue’s narrative of the resistances through which the fictional village of Kosawa seeks to survive being poisoned, attacked, and wearied into near-death, and then death, by the politics of oil extractivism under the control of Pexton, a United States-based company.
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