Samuel Reilly
Displacement Activity
In The Chibok Girls (2016), Helon Habila recalled an encounter with a Nigerian soldier at a military checkpoint just outside Chibok, in the north of the country. He presented his Virginia driving licence to the soldier, who laughingly greeted him as ‘Professor Americana’ before waving him through. Habila has made his name with novels steeped in the contemporary life of Nigeria, but in The Chibok Girls, a book-length report on the abduction by Boko Haram of 276 schoolgirls from the town in April 2014, one could sense him beginning to feel like a stranger in his own land.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The unisexual roster saves us from diatribes about the iniquity of the male gaze, and in any case the female gaze is capable of retaliating by aestheticising and eroticising the bodies of men.'
Peter Conrad on @markcousinsfilm's new documentary.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/lets-get-this-show-on-the-road
Dethier 'writes about mud buildings without the telltale modulations other critics use to distance so-called vernacular construction from the canon of high architecture.'
Building with earth may be the future, says @PhinHarper.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/build-brown-go-green
'Their legacy is tenacious. Throughout Europe, it lingers in the placement of borders, in patterns of confessional belief, in styles of architecture, even in ideas of national and supranational sovereignty.'
John Adamson on the hardy Habsburgs.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/born-to-marry