Review: Interminable
In Interminable, a teenage pair, Ese and Omejele, in Uromi village were classmates from where something of a young love was igniting. But it wasn't going to be an uncontrollable wildlife love because of two main reasons. Omejele is timid. Ese is a cultured girl from a strict and traditional home. Most importantly, they were from two different inreconcilable worlds. They book follows their rollercoster journey to finding themselves over and over with the lingering question of whether they would make anything of it.
Review by Philo O’fuose
Author: Blessing S. John-Abhulimen
Rating: 3 STARS
The title, Interminable, speaks to the central theme of the book; undying love. Young people have crushes in secondary school. They carry on a few months or years and then grow apart. But Omejele, and maybe Ese, could not just let go of their feelings for each other. This could either be because or in spite of the fact they never got around to express it.
Omejele is being raised by his aging and penniless grandmother who at the opening pages we learnt had come to visit the school headmaster with harvested vegetables from her farm. She pled and cried for him to let Omeje stay in school despite him owing fees for the past two school terms. This contrasts painfully with Ese whom was shown to be the beautiful daughter of a top local council official, brought to school in government issued vehicles and gets th princess treatment from teachers and classmates. Not to mention boys.
The story took a turn when Ese's family left the village of Uromi to Lagos following her father's new government ministry job. This was a let down for Omejele who had made a plan in his head of how to work hard to make something of himself and be worthy of Ese in the near future. With his target girl out of sight, his plan was going to crumble. Lagos was a big city. Far from the world he knew in Uromi. Ese in Lagos meant she was open to the world to find. It also meant the bar of winning her just got higher and he was losing faith in his ability to scale that bar.
The plot is a fantastic delivery in coming of age and chasing dreams. Each new height Ese attained meant a new level to beat for Omejele. It would become psychologically exhausting for him, but his resolve kept growing stronger. Life wasn't totally unfair to him, he was recording some.major wins, but Ese was the one that kept getting away.
The author has done a fine job of delivering a raw story of shifting targets and the social divide between two young people chasing life from different starting points.
The style of writing is a free flowing balance between teenage-speak dialogues and sentimentally proding narrations. The transition in setting from red earth dusty Uromi to urban late 90s Lagos with the backdrop of early third republic Nigeria is masterful and a splendid work of artistic genius.
Interminable is a beautiful story. Thrilling, suspenseful and wholesome in its character development. It's a story of the pursuit of fulfilment, fulfilment in social status, happiness and love. Readers who are nostalgic for the highly fluxed 2000s of Nigeria will find it a fulfilling read.