You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
by Akwaeke Emezi
Akwaeke Emezi’s book, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, is a polarizing love story that centers around Feyi, a young Nigerian-American artist nursing grief and trauma resulting from the death of her husband about five years earlier. When we meet her, she shares a New York apartment with her bubbly best friend Joy and is trying to find love again, a reason to live again and escape the trauma described as sucking the life out of her. However, when Feyi plunges into the dating pool again, she starts with reckless unprotected sex with Milan, a stranger she had just met at a rooftop party. Her summer spirals out of control from here into something no one could have envisaged.
Feyi meets Nasir, one of Milan’s friends and a dashing young man who is ready to bring the world to her feet but also patient enough to take things slow and give her room to explore the conflict between her grief and her need to move on and carry on with life. Nasir understands and is content with initially being her friend but hopes they can take things to the next level. He tries everything to show how intentional he is about his feelings toward her. Nasir gets his influential father to put in a good word for Feyi and, impressed by her art, the national museum of which Nasir’s father is a board member, decides to include her work in an exhibition for black diaspora artists. Feyi and Nasir then travel to his father’s mountain mansion on a tropical island to enjoy the summer and present her work at the museum.
When they arrive at the airport, it turns out that Nasir’s father is Alim Blake, an accomplished, wealthy celebrity chef, and Feyi is instantly overwhelmed by his person. Her stay at the mansion quickly becomes a battle to stem her dangerous but escalating attraction for Mr. Alim Blake while focusing on her work as an artist and her relationship with his son, Nasir. Feyi soon discovers that Alim also has a deep-seated grief from losing a loved one, in his case, his wife, over 20 years ago, and things turn for the worse when she realizes that her attraction to him is mutual. The conflict created by their disruptive match-up is the main focus of this unconventional romance novel.
Writing a review for this novel is quite challenging. What to think of this book is quite subjective, and no review can be adequate. Each reader must decide what they make of its unusual brand of romance. There’s a lot to criticize about this book, its love story, its lead characters, and the way certain characters are sacrificed to make the storyline make sense and be ‘justified’. The way one character is demonized to justify the protagonist’s bold actions and selfish choices is annoying. It reeks of the author projecting their colorized views and bias onto the characters. However, we must highlight the positives before delving into these perceived negatives. One must acknowledge the writer’s storytelling and technical prowess.
There’s a delicate quality to the prose that works quite well with how the writer wants to present the book. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, as the prose sometimes gets flowery, poetic, and even fluffy, but it doesn’t necessarily feel out of place, especially for a genre like romance. There is also a description of gorgeous scenery, exquisite food, and lavish architecture, and the generous mention of some black artists and musicians is a very nice touch.
This book is also generally wild and reckless from the very start. It piques your interest in these seemingly exotic black characters and puts your emotions and imagination into overdrive. The opening line, for instance, is as wild as opening lines go. But despite this, it is still on course to be a good book until around halfway into the book and Chapter seventeen, precisely because that’s where the author decides to ruin a wonderful character in Nasir to justify the actions of Feyi, who might just be one of the most unrelatable protagonists ever written in prose, and that’s where most of the issues begin.
From here on out, the book leaves a sour taste in the mouth, almost like being dragged across a floor entirely of broken glass. It presents a radical, individualistic view of love as something that can be oblivious to other important things and people. To develop the drama, are the two star-crossed lovers and how they feel, and may everything else apart from them be damned. While this may be true in specific scenarios, it doesn’t work, at least not in the reckless, indulgent, and inconsiderate way the two lead characters go about it. I struggle to see how or why the reader should sympathize with their love or understand why they’re willing to shatter everything and be inconsiderate and selfish (yes, that’s what it looks like or how the narrative presents it). There was nothing sweet or heartwarming in reading about this kind of love.
It becomes hard to stop reading at this point because you’re secretly hoping it gets better, and the storyline redirects these ‘lovers’ on a more sustainable path. Instead, we see them getting an easy pass — with zero consequences and no remorse — and apparently, all those who oppose them must either submit to the power of their love or be crushed, even if they have excellent reason to be in opposition. After all, as the book is hellbent on reiterating, no one else understands their shared trauma, and they deserve to be happy and do only the things that matter for them and them alone. It’s hard to fathom how the author sets about forcing the idea that Nasir and Lorraine are somehow wrong and are the villains in this story. At the same time, Seyi and Alim are absolved of all blame, contrition, and consequences, and their love is presented as so powerful that it must conquer all in its path.
It is also frustrating to see how Akwaeke Emezi entirely ruins Nasir’s character to create some sort of plot armor for the ‘flawless’, ‘brave’, and ‘powerful’ Feyi. The huge downward turn in his character is quite illogical and goes against everything we had previously associated him with. Suddenly, the sweet and caring Nasir is a monster and villain for not being okay with his father snatching his love interest on a trip he arranged! Feyi and Nasir’s conversation at the museum after he tried to ruin her art exhibition is one of the worst and most selfish in the book. Here, we find Feyi throwing her grief in his face as an excuse for her to do reckless and self-indulgent things and make generally bad choices that seem never to backfire.
This approach is ironic since Nasir shares the same trauma from losing his mother as a child ( the same woman Alim attributes his trauma). It’s okay to do whatever you want and damn the consequences because you’re enduring trauma, and other people will never understand that. Does trauma give you a pass to act brash? Because that’s how it sounded in this book. It is such an individualistic, selfish, and inconsiderate premise.
In conclusion, this love affair could have been presented better and handled differently. The author makes it seem like the only way for the lovers to act on their love is the only one that happens in the book. This romantic tension could have had a much better outlet. Feyi could have returned to New York as Joy suggested, ended things with Nasir, and moved on with her life. After missing her a lot, the strength of this love could have made Alim seek her out to New York. At this point, maybe this time, it would be his children encouraging Feyi to indulge herself and accept their father’s love because they can’t bear to see him depressed and lonely (or something along those lines). Indeed, that and many other possibilities are not as disruptive or morally bankrupt, but maybe this was the writer’s intention. Perhaps the author intentionally set out to create a chaotic, disruptive, and polarizing romance, and the intent appears to succeed in the long run.
Recommending this book may feel like a betrayal to some readers, while some people may genuinely enjoy its controversy, intrigue, and unconventional nature. As noted earlier, this is entirely subjective, and each reader must decide if it’s for them or otherwise. Apart from that, it is a good work of fiction from a technical and literary perspective, and specific audiences will appreciate its brilliance.
