Blackass
Igoni Barrett
3/5
Chatto & Windus 09/07/2015 Paperback
Work book exchange
This book is absurd, as soon as you grasp the Kafka in the story, you tend to be more forgiving. At first I read the story as an insight into the benefits that a white person might be awarded in the heart of Nigeria. As he goes for his first job interview ever, he is catapulted to the front of the queue. People give him money and help, for seemingly only one reason, that he is now white. The author plays with everything, and it feels like a very experimental piece of writing. The author meets his own protagonist and at times is the observer of his characters right alongside the reader, and perhaps more interestingly, the characters look back at him.
There was one VERY low point in the story where we had to read some twitter exchanges. Which to my mind put a stop to my picking up the book every day. I read slowly glad that the twitter fiasco was over, but unforgiving of the author for putting me through it and wary it would descend again.
Overall I thought this was an interesting novel with a readable story and it was a very thought provoking novel. But sometimes got caught up in its own literary brilliance and tripped itself up.
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