I imagine there is a delicate art to naming short story collections. How do you summarise so many different narratives under a single title? Which one story has the power to convey the themes and emotions of the entire collection?
The answer, if Lesley Nneka Arimah’s wide-ranging and awe-inspiring debut collection is anything to go by, is to choose the title of a story that is, in itself, just wide-ranging and awe-inspiring.
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky features a marvellous and imaginative assortment of narratives. The collection features everything from grounded, realist stories like “Wild”, which follows a young American woman on a visit to relatives in Nigeria, to more magical, abstract narratives like “Second Chances” and “Who Will Greet You at Home?,” both of which use fantastical elements to explore the theme of motherhood.
It’s hard to believe that Arimah is a debut writer, given the ease with which she handles such a wide variety of story types. Indeed, reading her collection I was repeatedly reminded of different short story writers that I love. The aforementioned titular story, a work of speculative fiction that explores a future where humanity has seemingly worked out the mathematical formula to the universe, made me think of the precise, intricate works of Ted Chiang. Her more realist stories repeatedly reminded me of Lucy Caldwell’s wonderful Multitudes, especially “War Stories” and “Wild,” both told from the perspective of young girls making sense of the world. Then there’s “What Is a Volcano,” a truly imaginative fable that stands on a par with Helen Oyeyemi.
And yet, although her writing often reminded me of other authors, her work never felt derivative or insubstantial. Arimah is very much her own writer, and a very good one at that. That she can so confidently and expertly adopt so many different story types is notable in itself. That she can combine them into a single collection and make them gel so well together with one another – the everyday with the fairytale, the magical realism with the science fiction – is utterly marvellous.
While Arimah’s stories are all very different in style and subject matter, they tend to share the same thematic undercurrent of time and fate. From the opening sentence of the collection’s very first story, “The Future Looks Good”, which describes a character who “doesn’t see what came behind her,” both literally and temporally, it feels as though the reader has discovered the omnipotent and omniscient formula later described in “What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky.” That opening story recounts the events that led to the protagonist being in a certain place at a certain time, preparing us for a book in which characters are so often held at the liberty of their pasts while remaining blind to their futures: a goddess unable to see the long-term consequences of her actions, a family haunted by their dead wife and mother, an unlucky woman unable to live up to her parents’ expectations, and the ignorance of a well-meaning father. That latter story, “Light,” opens with a piece of heart-breaking insight:
When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters. He did not know how quickly it would wick the dew off her, how she would be returned to him hollowed out, relieved of her better parts.
Before this, they are living in Port Harcourt in a bungalow in the old Ogbonda Layout…
How strange, and how brilliant, for Arimah to choose to present the future in the past tense, and the past in the present. It jars for a moment, and then it makes sense: that which is yet to come, her use of tenses declares, is as certain as that which has been.
I could go on, but I fear I may slip into spoilers that would unravel the fates of Arimah’s cast of characters faster than a man might fall from the sky. Suffice it to say, this is definitely one of the best books I have read this year, and one which I could happily recommend to anyone. I look forward to reading more from Arimah in the future; it doesn’t a universe-solving equation to say that we can expect more brilliant writing from her in the future.
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky – a few of my favourites:Wild – After her mother has had enough of her, a young woman is sent to Lagos to spend the summer with her aunt and cousin. “”Enough” had started with stupid teenage things that, magnified under the halo of Chinyere, my well-behaved cousin, made me a bad, bad girl.”
Windfalls – The child of an abusive, money-grabbing mother learns quickly how to take a more than a few knocks so that the pair of them may survive. “You’d like to believe the first fall, the one that left you with a permanent brace on your ankle, was real.”
Who Will Greet You at Home? – In a world where mothers construct babies out of the materials around them, one woman tries desperately to build a child that will be tough enough to survive. “The yarn baby lasted a good month, emitting dry, cotton-soft gurgles and pooping little balls of lint, before Ogechi snagged its thigh on a nail and it unravelled…”
