Thematic Contemporaneity, Plot Dexterity or Universal Characters? A Critical Review of Igba Ogbole's 'Matilda'

Essay from the year 2024 in the subject African Studies - Literature, Ahmadu Bello University, language: English, abstract: This book review is an introduction to Igba Ogbole's latest novel, 'Matilda'. The review highlights numerous striking features that make the novel one of the unputdownables. Igba Ogbole's 'Matilda' is a harrowing, yet absorbing and compelling Bildungsroman that chronicles, in a subtle plot, the adverse effects of love and betrayal on the novel's eponymous protagonist, Matilda. How Matilda rises against these perfidious acts to become a legal luminary in pursuit of justice for the defenseless constitutes an important part of Ogbole's tale, reflecting the novel's didacticism and the truism of the extent and limitations of the human will to survive. The novel is a carefully crafted work that reflects, accurately, the traits of a realistic novel, and specifically, a novel of formation. The title is therefore appropriate as it begins and ends with Matilda. The novel's opening is gripping and hauntingly full of challenging questions that open up several vistas of speculation in the mind of a curious reader within a short period of time: Who is Lucas Jampa? Is he truly a disaster distributor, as suspected by Ochanya? Who is Ehi? Could she be Matilda? The artistic dexterity displayed by Ogbole in concealing possible answers to these questions, yet sustaining the interest of readers till the last pages of the novel, marks Matilda as one of the unputdownables.