“Death of the Author” follows struggling author and lecturer, Zelu. She feels lost in her very big and successful family. When she finds out that she is now fired from her job at a college and her latest book has failed to find a publisher, Zelu wonders how she can go on. We follow her over the course of years as she pulls a book out of of her “Rusted Robots” and becomes a critical darling and then “cancelled” by her fans. Through it all I think Okorafor is showing us all what does it mean to be an author, fan, and even what it means when we say “death of an author”.
If you want to know more about what and where Okorafor is going with this, you may want to read “The Death of the Author” which is an essay by Roland Barthes. I thought this whole book was quite timely since I think right now we have a lot of readers at times these days telling you what they got out of a book and how often we find that is not what the author meant at all. Heck, we even get it with movies nowadays too.
Not a bad book, but it was hard to like the main character, Zelu. Selfish characters always get to me. I did feel for Zeul a bit when you see how her family is and has treated her since her childhood injury left her paralyzed. What I thought was interesting though is that Zelu refuses to be put in a box or her novel either. She doesn’t want to be a champion to others, let alone have her disability define her, but you can also see why at times so many turned on her.
The central parts of the book and even her novel focuses on her family’s culture (Nigerian, but her mother a princess and her father is not a royal) and how that came up again throughout this book. We get to see some parts of the Nigerian culture that I loved, food, language, clothing, etc. And even getting to see the family dynamics in life and death was great. I think the science fiction/fantasy bits that are part of the book (outside of Rusted Robots) really didn’t work for me. Maybe because there wasn’t enough explanation.
I did love the story within the story that was going on (Rusted Robots). But with the book showing us that story and then interviews with Zelu’s family and friends, things started to drag a bit which is honestly why I gave this one 4 stars.
I do have to say that the ending just didn’t make a lot of sense to me, I think we are supposed to guess based on the interviews we get with her family and friends what happens to Zelu.