❦If book reviews were one-word verdicts, Nnamdi Anyadu’s A Meal Is A Meal would be “fabulistic”—in the sense that the stories, although mostly realist, wield a strong fable-like character, where fable and folktale elements sometimes intrude. A moral takeaway, a witty twist, or mysterious tangerines. Like the story “Forbidden Meat,” a mother rabbit shelters a fugitive, a prince who later abolishes the eating of rabbit in the land to reward her kindness; or “The Porridge Strategy” recalling the wiles of tortoise who wins in a race with a faster animal; and “Saara” where a pregnant woman hosts children in her neighbourhood, who eat her treat of asaro and rub their oily palms on her bump to bless her baby—all of which reinforce a kind of folky taste in narration.
“Folky” is, in fact, the right word, especially when you consider Anyadu’s near perfection of the opening glee, better known as the art of the opening sentence, which the folktale is almost nothing without: “The wife stands in the middle of a gallery, in a loose, sky-blue gown resembling a gentle wave on the open sea.” “Yellow talked a lot, so let’s start there.” “The girl could not say she liked the town.” “Whenever we receive visitors into our town, we tell them that we do not eat the rabbit.” “The boy was six, going on seven, when he heard the sermon.”
With such deliberateness in motioned language, one can easily think of Anyadu’s collection as a lesson on style, which I myself approached the stories. And this style, one observes, is for straightforward language, and even straightforward storytelling, executed with compact, clean, marksman prose. If it is possible, Anyadu will strip all flourish from sentences to the very minimum, but this doesn’t take away the eventual brilliance that results from this. We read in a passage the litany of a young man’s admiration of a lady: she has “neck, slender and svelte. Her hips wider than her shoulder. Her butt, a glory.”
“Her butt, a glory.” Very marksman.
However, what stories have Anyadu to tell in this slim collection? “Potluck Jollof,” which first appeared in Isele in 2022, comes as the second to the last story here: it is a tale of a sisterhood of friends seeking community in the city, away from the boredom of work. One of the ladies prepares a tasty jollof using a secret ingredient that is the stuff of rumoured taboo and city tales. My second encounter with Anyadu’s fiction was “The Coward of Umustead,” an Africanfuturistic, written in Tutuolaian, but even better, about a village’s mute and a group of delinquents who steal a flying motorcycle. This didn’t make it into this collection, which is food-themed.
Whatever story he chooses to tell, Anyadu remains entertaining, imaginative, and a pleasure to read: in A Meal Is A Meal, collecting 12 stories, a writer places food offerings to a recently acquired replica of ancient Benin bronze art and feels her returned inspiration to write after two years is a result of this act. In another story, a daughter who moves to a new town is under pressure to host an exotic family dinner serving human flesh; a boy dreams of a lady in a yellow dress who gives him food he shouldn’t eat, the pastor warns; a man stops at an akara spot before going to work, undresses himself for a fight with someone who breaks the queue; stories about food, or drinking, doing much more than filling the stomach, drawing conclusion that some meals may be more meal than others.
Because of Anyadu’s straightforward storytelling, you find that you have completed one story and are already on the next, that you may reach the end of the book too early, desiring more. A desire not only felt for the book, but also for the individual stories. You realise you are about to read the last sentence in a story; this is too early; you question why Anyadu withholds his talent. Key in a reference: Alex La Guma’s “A Matter of Taste”—coincidentally a story surrounding the subject of food—where the author gives full satiation.
Not to say all of Anyadu’s stories in the collection end this way; “The Recipe for Comfort,” for example, ends perfectly. But should Anyadu stick to this habit of quick endings, we plea that he stretches his gift for us a little more.♦
A Meal Is A Meal (Narrative Landscape Press, 2025) Order a copy HERE.
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Carl Terver is the founding editor of Afapinen, a critic and the author of Glory to the Sky. He was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2024.