You made a fool of death with your beauty — An ode to pain, healing that ultimately falls flat
You made a fool of death with your beauty is a tale that follows Feyi Adekola, a woman coming out of loss and navigating love, lust often in questionable circumstances. Loss, grief, they are emotions everyone seems to relate to more lately. Mourning and the subsequent healing scantily come in the six stages, or goes down over time for some people, it is messy and long lasting. Emezi takes on a very central theme, how do you move on with grief. It is her 6th published book in a span of three years and it shows.
The title of the book comes from Florence + The Machine’s hit song “Hunger”, “How could anything bad ever happen to you? / You make a fool of death with your beauty.” Feyi has been dealing with bad, as she has spent five years mourning her husband in a car crash. Emezi, in showing the tale of Feyi’s healing, starts the first chapter at a Bushwick rooftop accident, where she intends to end her five years of mourning and successfully has sex with a stranger. Strangely enough, that hedonistic pursuit might be the most memorable and likable aspect of the novel’s central character. Everything else feels like Emezi intends to drive shock value, and the protagonist is in a hedonistic haze and using grief as justification for rather crude choices.
The plot of “You made a fool of death with your beauty” reads off like a telenovela, without the foreshadowing to understand the choices made. Feyi continues to have sex with the stranger from the rooftop for a few months, then stops, eventually ending up in an ambiguous relationship with Nasir, his friend. Nasir is enthralled with Feyi; Feyi wants to take things slowly. Taking things slowly, Nasir puts Feyi in touch with a prominent curator and takes Feyi to his family’s house on a Caribbean island, where she stays as his guest while installing her exhibit. She then begins a somewhat relationship with Nasir’s father, Alim, an eminent chef going through being widowed for 18 years and deals with the fallout.
The grief in the book to Emezi’s credit is palpable and pervades Feyi’s interactions as she highlights poignantly “The ghosts were always sudden”. It serves as the drive behind the work she does, and the reason she offers to her friend as to why Nasir’s father Alim is the one she wants, she has found someone to be “alone next to”. It feels wooden nevertheless, Emezi explains the cause of the grief, but offers no more than an explanation of how she became widowed. Her marriage, the grief she dealt with, the mourning or healing are not the focus for Emezi, Feyi is on a hunger for more joie de vivre to deal with her grief and it is all Emezi treats us to.
As a result, the protagonist is deeply unlikable, Emezi offers no real way to empathize with her asides of empathizing with being on a joy ride. Feyi’s reasoning for leaving the stranger for his friend Nasir, Nasir for his father Alim, is a quest for more passion. Emezi, to her defense, provides context of a shared longing or experience, as to why each person was a better fit than the previous, but it ultimately falls flat as her writing of Feyi starts with her immediate attraction and desire for the other person, despite the compromising position it keeps previous partners in. It ensures Feyi comes off as two dimensional, without much substance.
Feyi is not the only character that suffers from Emezi’s choices, the supporting characters are two dimensional, typecast in stereotypes. Feyi’s friend Joy is presented as a bisexual woman, open to new experiences while nursing a pain from her current love. Alim is presented as a bisexual man, open to new experiences while nursing a pain from a previous love. Nasir is presented as an overeager man who is completely enthralled by Feyi, and seems questionable as a result. None of these parties show any side to them asides how Emezi initially phrased them. They are wooden like Feyi, playing a part casted and end up not feeling or sounding like real people.
Emezi is an interesting storyteller with amazing pieces of art to her name, “Freshwater”, “Death of Vivek Oji”, books that feel ethereal and provide such an elevation of story tell. You have made a fool of death with your beauty is different, it is simply a 279 paged hedonistic bend with an unlikable character that has parallels with Paulo Caelho’s “The Alchemist” central character Santiago and ultimately falls flat in its tale and the telling of it.
Rating: 1/5
P.S.: If you liked this, you would like the review on Yejide Kilanko’s stunning take on navigating relationships with a power imbalance, A good name
