By Minkail Olaitan
The book Mad & Ordinary (or a writer’s attempt at absurdism) arrives as a book that refuses to be useful. In the preface, Adewole Daniel Bamidele opens with a punchy, self-inflicted statement: “You are holding a book that does not wish to teach you anything.” What follows is fourteen chapters of sustained, often feverish monologue in which a young writer stages his confrontation with the blank page, the body, death, and the silence that outlasts every sentence. Somewhere within this intricate web of thoughts, the author sits before an infinite canvas, scribbling fervently about absurdism in prose that falls somewhere between the confessional lyric, the philosophical sermon, and the long, accumulating essay.
The nearest literary kin are not other Nigerian novels of the last decade, but the writers Bamidele himself summons onto the page. Like Kahlil Gibran, he writes in clustered metaphors that treat ordinary experience as already mythic. Like Camus in his essays, he returns again and again to the collision between the human hunger for meaning and the silence of the world. Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, he is willing to show the sweaty palm and the grinding of teeth rather than the sunlit piazza. The difference is that Bamidele has not yet learned, or has chosen not to learn, the restraint that keeps those voices from drowning out his own. The result is a text that feels, at its best, like a mind still discovering what it can sustain, and, at its weakest, like a coterie of ghosts speaking through a single mouth and from a single mind.
Consider the opening of the first chapter. Bamidele writes of the moment before dawn when “the world forgets that it has a name,” then asks, “What is this compulsion? This mad, magnificent, miserable urge to inscribe meaning upon the void?” The sentence does several things at once. It refuses the usual justifications for writing (to be remembered, to be understood, to tell a truth) and replaces them with an image of the pen as “a splinter of the Cross, a feather from the wing of Icarus, a crowbar to pry open the lid of your own skull.” The metaphors are excessive by design. They do not clarify; they accumulate. A reader looking for the cooler, more observational distance of writers like Teju Cole may find Bamidele’s insistence on multilayered metaphors almost overwhelming. His prose makes a conscious refusal to step back and examine its own claims. It stays inside them.
The second chapter offers a clearer test of the method. Bamidele proposes that death is not the final note of a life but its genre: “Death is the genre. It is the style, the category, the architecture in which the true music is played.” He then presses the idea further, suggesting that an infinite song would be “a hell of repetition… a perfectly blue sky that has forgotten the joy of a single cloud.” The claim is not original, but the pressure he applies to it is. Where a more analytical writer might stop at the observation that finitude gives life value, Bamidele treats death as a merciful editor that “refuses to let a beautiful phrase become a cliché.” The sentence carries weight because it risks sentimentality and then refuses easy consolation. Immortality, in this telling, is not the continuation of the song but “the permanent wound of its absence.” The wound remains.
The following chapters move the same concern into the social world. Watching merchants in a market square, Bamidele writes that “they believe they know where they are going,” and that this belief is “the first, and most profound, of their practical ignorances.” He returns to the point through the story of a condemned man who sees the entire universe in a single fig and a guard who remembers him only as “the madman who cried over a piece of fruit.” Somewhere in this passage, Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s prophetic figure, seems to regain life only to enter a more miserable state. The scene is staged rather than observed; we never hear the actual language of the market or the prison. Yet the distinction between the practical ignorance that builds empires and the deeper ignorance that weeps over a fig is one of the book’s sharper instruments. It is also one of the places where the monologue most clearly risks becoming just that: a monologue. The reader is told that true love consists in “the perpetual, trembling wonder of the unknowing,” but is rarely shown two people actually failing to know each other. Bamidele presents this failure as a necessary stage toward true understanding, allowing love to grow stronger wings.
What the book does achieve is a record of a mind attempting to inhabit the absurd without converting it into comfort. The later chapters continue the project under different titles, including the hypocrisy of the sane, the insignificance of a single man, and the sacred art of insanity, but the central gesture remains the same. Bamidele is less interested in resolving the questions than in staying inside them long enough for the reader to feel their weight. In spaces such as Brittle Paper, reviewers have often treated this kind of risk as worth the occasional excess, particularly when the excess is not decorative but central to the work itself. The same standard can be applied here. The density of allusion, the preference for the oracular over the precise, and the occasional substitution of atmosphere for thought are real limitations. So is the seriousness with which the book refuses to offer the reader a way out.
Mad & Ordinary will not suit every reader. It asks for a willingness to sit with a voice that is still discovering its own limits. For those willing to accept the terms the preface sets, that the book is a wound rather than a destination, an invitation to unlearn rather than a store of answers, the attempt is recognizably alive. The door, as the cover suggests, is not a room. It is an opening. Whether one steps through it is, finally, the reader’s decision.
QUESTION OF THE DAY
Can a book change the way you see the world without giving you any answers? What is one book, idea or passage that challenged something you once believed?
STAY IN THE MOOD
Stay curious. Read beyond the familiar, question the ideas that make you comfortable, and give yourself permission to sit with uncertainty. Not every book is meant to teach you a lesson. Some are meant to disturb your thinking, open a door and leave you with better questions than the ones you brought along.
