“I’m not what anyone thinks I am,” Vivek tells us early on. (Emezi, who is nonbinary, uses they/them pronouns.) And we readers, in turn, also find ourselves unequipped with the knowledge of what Vivek’s preferred pronouns might actually be, because he never tells us, and all of his chapters are in the first person. They failed so completely that they refer to him almost exclusively with he/him pronouns, even after they recognize that Vivek does not identify as a man. And the sin of those who loved Vivek was that they failed to quite see him for who he was. “This is Emezi’s first and greatest intervention on the crime-novel form,” writes Lily Meyer in a terrific review at NPR: “nobody loved Vivek impurely.” Everyone who claims to love Vivek - his mother his friends and most importantly, his cousin and lover Osita - truly did love him.īut sin lies at the center of every murder mystery.
But as The Death of Vivek Oji goes on, and Vivek’s mother Kasita becomes our detective, trying to solve the death of her son, Emezi refuses to follow the template of the genre. And on the day he died, the market in Ngwa, the Nigerian town where he lived, was burned down.Ī classic murder mystery would have us spend the rest of the novel hunting for the ne’er-do-well who killed Vivek, scanning all his closest connections for the motive that would have them commit such a dastardly crime. That line is all that exists of the first chapter, and it’s all we need to know: Vivek Oji lived, and now he is dead. “They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died,” Emezi writes, in the novel’s opening line.
Vivek Oji begins, like all murder mysteries do, with a death. Probably the best advice I’ve come across when it comes to reading Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji, the Vox Book Club’s April pick, is to treat it as an inverted murder mystery. The Vox Book Club is linking to to support local and independent booksellers.
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