In Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor is fascinated with stories, their tellers, and the moments that birth them. On the night of her sister’s wedding, failing author Zelu Onyenezi-Onyedele hits rock bottom. Her latest novel racks up its tenth rejection from publishers, and she gets fired from her job as a professor while on holiday. Being surrounded by her high-achieving siblings and her relatives who see her wheelchair and treat her as invisible or even cursed doesn’t exactly help.
Extraordinarily depressed and high out of her mind, she comes up with the bones of what will become “Rusted Robots”—a science-fiction novel following robots in a post-apocalyptic Nigeria. Humanity is long but a memory, and the machinery left behind has sorted itself into disparate and warring tribes. There, a scholarly robot named Ankara collects what’s left of humanity’s stories and tries to save her world from impending destruction.
Writing her manuscript consumes her days and wallet until ComEd finally cuts her power for non-payment. She moves home with her parents, and the year spent tucked away in her childhood bedroom pays off. “Rusted Robots” quickly soars to the top of the bestseller lists, racks up accolades, and even spawns a knock-off Nollywood film. But the book she spent the past two years writing also threatens to upend her personal relationships and change her life forever.
What you get is a weird mix of literary fiction and science-fiction, interspersed with interviews conducted with Zelu’s friends and family pouring out all their memories of her and theories for why she does what she does, even when she baffles them. Compared to some of Okorafor’s other Africanfuturist novels, like Who Fears Death and Zahrah the Windseeker, this book feels the most in our reality. Still, it’s hard to figure out where to shelve it in the library.
But Okorafor has a lot to offer outside its story-within-a-story structure. Short-tempered and deeply sensitive, Zelu is often the odd one out among her five siblings—all of whom took on the “good” first-generation immigrant careers of doctor, lawyer, and engineer, in contrast with her tumultuous writing career. She is prickly, sometimes obnoxious, and impulsive. As the daughter of Nigerian immigrants in an Igbo-Yoruba family, home is sometimes complicated. Her family is her bedrock and chain as she explodes at family get-togethers and their relationships go through the wringer.
Death of the Author is garnering a lot of comparisons to Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. Part of it makes sense since both satirize the publishing industry and how it can monetize minority writers while diluting their messages. It’s also metafictional in that same way; it’s hard not to read Okorafor’s life—having grown up in Chicago in a Nigerian American family and her disability—as having shaped her protagonist here. But publishing and the highs and lows of internet fame are a minor part of this book, preferring to delve into family drama and Zelu’s new life.
You can also add it to the shelf of books with a setting that is just so Chicago. Zipping back and forth from Navy Pier to her parent’s home on the South Side and eating at familiar restaurants, like Yassa in Bronzeville, the high heats and somehow just as intense colds. Rather than some vague, nameless American every-city, it felt like home because it was a city I recognized, and I loved it for that.
My only gripe is far into spoiler territory, but the interviews felt like the book was building up to some foreboding climax that never happened. The book is full of exasperated family members, many of whom say something akin to—she had a path we could never sway her from. Zelu’s impulsiveness leads her to decisions that her friends warn her might lead her to danger. There’s rising action that builds but no release. But by the end, the explosion I felt like I was promised became a balloon leaking air. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it left me pawing at the back of the book, wondering if I had flipped past the final chapter.
Okorafor first sold this book to her publisher as “The Africanfuturist,” so the title change to Death of the Author feels important. In the book, it comes up only twice—once from her university student who uses it as an excuse not to try very hard at writing, and more importantly, near the end, when Ankara, the robot scholar, latches onto the phase because storytelling survived beyond humanity (the authors) to keep shaping the world.
The title “Death of the Author” calls back to a 1967 Roland Barthes essay by the same name, arguing that traditional literary criticism’s dedication to authorial intent was all rather silly, and while interpreting a text, we should all behave as if the author has already died. Two years later, Michel Foucault would go on to write in “What is An Author?” that writing possesses the “right to kill, to be its author’s murderer” and that we must watch for the openings that the author’s disappearance uncovers.
The title, then, is meant to be ironic because Okorafor hates Barthes’ essay, as she told Bookseller a few months ago, saying, “You can’t separate the author from the work. You can’t separate it and that’s okay.”
Where Barthes would once write that “the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the author,” Okorafor writes through Ankara that she has come to understand “that author, art and audience all adore each other…They create a tissue, a web, a network. No death is required for this form of life.”
In Okorafor’s writing, reports of the author’s death were greatly exaggerated. The reader lives as well. It’s stories all the way down.
FICTION
By Nnedi Okorafor
William Morrow & Company
Published January 14, 2025
