Helon Habila WriterSelected Reviews:
'Measuring Time confirms Habila as an exceptional voice in African literature. His great skill is to imbue the individual and the local with panoramic, historical significance. Colonial history, tribal myth, 20th-century politics, Plutarch and the poetry of Christopher Okigbo are tightly woven into precise and loving descriptions of landscape. The novel's triumph is to allow hope to endure.
‘But a crop of exciting new Nigerian writers has emerged in the shaky nascent democracy that followed Abacha’s death in 1998... they include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Purple Hibiscus; California-based political poet Chris Abani; Sefi Atta, author of Everything Good Will Come (2005); Uzodinma Iweala, who wrote Beasts of No Nation (2005); Caine Prize-winning writer S.A. Afolabi; and London-based Helen Oyeyemi. And then there is Helon Habila, arguably their leading player.’
“What is exciting about Habila is that he combines …western literary archetypes with a much older, oracular style of African tale-telling in which the novel becomes part of the oral narrative tapestry of a particular community. ...Measuring Time is both a historical novel that "measures time" in the sense of comparing historical periods, and a psychological study of a man who must "measure up" to his brother and the critical demands of a society in crisis. Most importantly of all, however, it is a triumphant celebration of relativism.”
'Measuring Time weaves the stories of individuals and communities, past and present, nation and continent. Often, a character is shown and the question posed: what is the story? The novel attempts to answer, using structural devices including letters, biographical notes, newspaper reports, songs and oral storytelling.'
'Measuring Time Habila's accomplished second novel, overlays this tradition of despair with a self-consciously mythic plot that brings the book to the borders of that definitively "postcolonial" style, magic realism. It tells the story of twin brothers, Mamo and LaMamo, brought up by a controlling, status-obsessed father in the village of Keti in northeastern Nigeria.'
"Habila has packed a great deal into fewer than 400 pages, but he knows how to pace his arrative and it is enlivened by some wonderful writing...It contains a love story, tender but unresolved, and compassionate portraits of women in what remains a patriarchal culture. Above all, though, Habila fulfills his self-appointed task of demonstrating what human beings have in common, struggling to balance tradition and modernity, no matter where they live."
‘Helon Habila's engrossing African epic, Measuring Time, is the story of the very different educations these near-orphans receive. Their mother died when they were born in the mid-1960s, and they're so estranged from their philandering father that they plant scorpions in his shoes. He's oblivious even to this proof of hostility, so it's left to the villagers of Keti, especially an optimistic aunt and a worldly uncle, to raise the boys.’
This is an admirably epic book, reaching from village life to Africa's political seismic shifts. As a novel it is hard to fault, as a second novel it is remarkable, because while Habila is vivid he also has a mature discipline. He gives us just enough detailed colour to bring Keti and its characters to life without overshadowing Mamo; just enough letters home from LaMamo to keep us worried (very) about his fate; just enough humour to balance the melancholy. And he has a good ear, for LaMamo's African-English letters, Mamo's educated hesitancy, the Nigerian recruiting sergeant's pidgin.
‘This novel is so bitter, so sweet, so humbling. It says we will always be crushed by the times we live in. Where is the comfort? Maybe it is that, in memory, we return.’
‘Measuring Time is set in 1963, three years after Independence, in the (fictional) northern village of Keti, where the twins Mamo and LaMamo are born. As teenagers in the 1970s, high on stories of the recent Civil War, the boys dream of glamorous army careers. But Mamo's sickle-cell anaemia means they must separate; while his brother becomes an itinerant soldier, joining rebel factions across the African continent, the studious Mamo remains in Keti, surviving his ill health to become a history teacher.’
