You know we love books at The Bagus but sometimes we welcome fresh eyes to review some of our books like @ohioleh, our guest reviewer and allround creative has done ever so beautifully with A Review of @osi_suave Osikhena Dirisu’s The Confessions of a Lagos Bachelor.
The Confessions of a Lagos Bachelor is a book by Osikhena Dirisu (popularly, Osi Suave), one of Lagos’ finest OAPs. It is a book about Osi’s lovescapades and radio work and we’re led through it in twelve chapters, or vignettes and twenty mid pages of pictures. It is a pleasant book with the fleeting gratification of TV shows.
In the first chapter Before We Were Men, he is mourning the nakedness of his boyhood and all the lost innocence. It should have been no more than a prologue. By the next chapter, Serendipity, he is twenty-nine and, like Sinbad the Sailor, has come upon a treasure of a woman in a sea of people at a listening party. By the third, Nightmares and Morse Codes, they’re done and he’s devastated. It is a chain of small highs and devastation from here on.
Every chapter begins with a quote from a pop song, which seems natural to me now, for an OAP. The fourth Chapter, Desolation opens with a quote from the remedial hit 1-800-273-8255 by Logic. It may seem unconscionable to most people that anyone should contemplate suicide over a breakup but that’s exactly the MO of depression. It is an amplifier of small pains.
But his ideas of its nature may have been a little incoherent.
He goes from a dismissive:
‘I tried to explain it to people but the closest to a show of concern I got was them asking me to seek help; like I had a communicable disease or something.’
To suggesting the same ‘apathetical’ thing barely a paragraph later.
‘It’s so easy to feel bad for yourself….but the easiest way to get your life on track is to ask for help, to open up to people about your feelings…’
In our jungle world, ‘Seek Help’ may just be the greatest concern. It is an expression of self-awareness (that they are helpless) and love (that they would like you to get better.)
Some portions of the book will punish you and your time. For example, before you get into the actual book, there is the hell to cross called ‘First Words’ with so many cameos from celebrities it could’ve as well been a JSS1 girl’s scrapbook. It should have been the epilogue. If you make it through chapter five, I Told My Therapist About You, you will end up telling your therapist about Osi.
I suspect what Osi tries to achieve with the book is that compulsive documenting of our small histories that made us graffiti our names on school walls. He’s trying to tell us ‘Osi Wz Ere’ and not very much more.
But for all its artlessness and shortcomings (what book hasn’t any?), I enjoyed the book. The way one enjoys TV. How many books these days are discussing Lagos nights and girlfriends with South London accents?
Get the book and read it. We welcome your thoughts.
Photo credit: thenet.ng