The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi
How many ways are there to know a person? You can know someone through their parents and their parents’ parents, through the accumulated stories of preceding generations. You can know someone through their friends: the way their friends look at them, laugh with them, celebrate them. You can know someone through photographs, through the contents of their closet, through the daily way they live, the way they die, the way they are mourned. You can know someone by witnessing their process of coming to know themselves.
The Death of Vivek Oji traces all of these ways of knowing. Traces in the way a video camera traces a beautiful subject, or in the way a lover’s hand traces the outline of their beloved. With tenderness and attentiveness and downright beautiful prose, this novel—at once a coming of age story and an elegy—unfolds the story of Vivek Oji petal by petal, simultaneously revealing the story not just of one character’s self-actualization, but of a multicultural Nigerian community; a young, queer friend group; and the ways our desire to love and protect those we cherish the most can manifest both for better and for worse.