The Metamorphosis
The opening sentence of this novel will seem strangely familiar to anyone who has read Kafka’s legendary story about that day Gregor Samsa woke up to find that he had turned into a bug overnight. Furo Wariboko experiences a similar overnight transformation and the result is conveyed in the second sentence through metaphor:
“He was lying nude in bed, and when he raised his head a fraction he could see his alabaster belly, and his pale legs beyond, covered with fuzz that glinted bronze in the cold daylight pouring in through the open window.”
Terms like “alabaster” and “pale” constitute metaphorical imagery which should never be used in describing Furo. After all, he is a black native of Nigerian.
Strange Anomaly
There is one particular odd anomaly to the transformation of Furo overnight from looking like a black man to looking like a white man. The alteration is not complete; almost, yes, but it falls just short in one particularly sensitive area for Furo:
“seen beside the whiteness of his back and legs, his rump looked black and angry.”
Cultural Logic, Questionable Science
The narrator provides some insight into Nigerian cultural attitudes toward manhood and expectations of masculinity. Although, it must be admitted, this belief does not seem to be based upon particularly sound science and no amount of metaphor is going to disguise that central flaw:
“Manhood and its machismo are attributed to the seed, which then follows that the failure to make a man is the egg’s burden.”
The Real Universal Language
Forget Esperanto, music and especially diplomatic French, the author has located the real thing when it comes to a universal language understood in every country and by every culture. He arrives at this epiphany from the perspective of a pedestrian looking onto a massive traffic jam:
“A riot of honking assailed the ears: short warning honks, long angry honks, continuous harrying honks: a language as universal as a scream.”
Character Sketch
One of the most prevalent and efficient uses of simile in fiction is to create a quick snapshot of a character. This is an especially effective technique when the comparison is being made from the perspective of another character as the simile can sometimes say as much about the person making the comparison as it does about the person whom comparison is helping to describe:
“Furo’s first instinct was to refuse. He was tempted by the money on offer…and yet he knew he couldn’t bear to work under Umukoro’s weight. The man looked like a butcher and sounded like a moneylender.”
