Going back to Lagos in Teju Cole’s ‘Every Day Is for the Thief’

Imagine a patient, observant and precise writer like the late W.G. Sebald reborn as a Nigerian exile, returning to and then wandering about that country’s teeming and chaotic cultural capital, Lagos. That, in broad strokes, is the voice of the narrator of Teju Cole’s fine novel, “Every Day Is for the Thief.”

“The air in the strange environment of this city is dense with story, and it draws me into thinking of life as stories,” Cole’s unnamed narrator says halfway through the novel, as he becomes more deeply immersed in the disorder, the striving, the corruption and the inventiveness of Lagos and its people. “The narratives fly at me from all directions … And that literary texture of lives full of unpredictable narrative, is what appeals.”

Cole earned a large following in the United States for his PEN Faulkner Award-winning “Open City,” published in 2011. That novel told the story of a Nigerian immigrant and his wanderings in New York City and other places.

FOR THE RECORD:
“Every Day Is for the Thief”: A review of the book “Every Day Is for the Thief” by Teju Cole in the March 23 Arts & Books section said the capital of Nigeria is Lagos. Lagos is Nigeria’s cultural capital; the actual capital is Abuja. —

The U.S.-born Cole was raised and educated in Nigeria. Before he wrote “Open City,” he had written “Every Day Is for the Thief,” his first book, published in Nigeria in 2007, and which Random House is now issuing in the United States for the first time.

“Every Day Is for the Thief” is billed as a work of fiction. But it reads much more like a travelogue. It tells the story of an unnamed narrator’s return to Nigeria after a decade away in the United States, and it begins in a small patch of Nigeria on U.S. soil — the Nigerian consulate in New York.

When the narrator insists on a receipt for the bribe he has to pay at the consulate to get his passport, the official behind the counter asks, “Why trouble yourself? … Aren’t you more interested in getting your passport than trying to prove a point?”

Reflecting on the question, the narrator writes, “Yes, but isn’t it this casual complicity that has sunk our country so deep into its woes?”

Corruption is a stereotype about Nigeria in the American imagination, but to many Nigerians, apparently, it’s an all-too-familiar aspect of public and private life there. When he returns to Lagos, the narrator of “Every Day Is for the Thief” feels overwhelmed by the venality of the city’s life — from the blatant requests for bribes from customs agents and police officers, to the pathetic pleas of beggars, and the extortions scheme of bands of criminals known as “area youth.” Even the cool record shop Cole’s narrator finds isn’t really selling the music CDs on offer — it’s selling pirated copies of the music.

Cole’s narrator never gets used to the idea, however, that money will always trump rules, regulations and reason. And questions of how ethics should work in a land of endless need take up much of “Every Day Is for the Thief.”

As in “Open City,” there isn’t much of a plot in “Every Day Is for the Thief.” There’s a back story about the narrator’s broken family life, but his return home is not tinged with nostalgia. When the narrator meets people and goes places that remind him of his Lagos youth, it’s mostly to put into sharper focus the tragedy of the present; as in the case of an old school friend who has died in an accident, a story the novel recounts with a kind of stunned distance.

In fact, Cole’s narrator approaches just about everything in Lagos with a great deal of emotional distance, as if he were trying to protect himself from his fraught native country. At times the book feels like an essay or an extended lament of Nigeria’s woes, as when he visits the country’s national museum and finds the exhibits embarrassingly lacking and poorly prepared.

Quoting Fela Kuti’s song “Shuffering and Shmiling,” Cole’s narrator writes that “there is a tremendous cultural pressure to claim that one is happy, even when one is not … It is wrong to be unhappy.” The narrator clearly won’t accept false happiness. The years he’s spent in America have given him too much perspective.

“I am not going to move back to Lagos,” Cole’s narrator writes, not long after concluding the “venality,” “the general air of surrender” and “helplessness” in Nigeria are too much to bear. “No way. I don’t care if there are a million untold stories.” A few sentences later, however, he writes, “I am going to move back to Lagos. I must.”

One senses that the author, like his narrator, is of two minds about the great country and city in West Africa that helped form him. Despite everything, he sees beauty there, above all in the creativity and resilience of its people. The novel ends with a final image of “dignity,” as the narrator remembers a visit to a place of quiet ritual in a Lagos neighborhood of narrow streets.

“I am in a labyrinth,” Cole writes. It is a labyrinth whose “winding paths lead, finally, to a meaningful center.”

“Every Day Is for the Thief” is a wonderful meditation on modern African life that will help cement Cole’s reputation as a prose stylist. More than that, it is a book that never fails to find a thoughtful and essential thing to say, with each of its finely crafted sentences and paragraphs offering a vision of justice and order to a people beset by so many woes.

hector.tobar@latimes.com

Every Day Is for the Thief

Teju Cole
Random House: 176 pp., $23