Manuel Torres reviews Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count (Knopf, New York, 2025, 474p).
Manuel Torres is a playwright, theater and film director, and the founder of the Gestaltendeslicht Theatre Company. His works have been staged in Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, China, Japan, the United States, Spain, and Hungary. His play Caravaggio’s Dagger was selected for the official competition of the International Festival of Classical Theatre of Almagro in Spain (2017). He is currently Head of the English Language and Literature Department at the Budapest British International School, and Coordinator of the cycle of comparative literature “Impossible Polyphonies” at the Cervantes Institute of Budapest.
In a world convoluted by a pandemic, questions of grief, identity, and resilience have taken on a polyphonic song, dedicated to women navigating the layered injustices of gender, race, and cultural alienation. Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s lockdown memoir hums an existential question just right at the beginning in the opening sentence: “I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being” (3), which unveils the subtle theme of the novel: the disconnection between humans as an ontological flaw. Therefore, one could argue that the polyphonic novel contributes to the diasporic estrangement phenomenon not only through grand proclamations of the souls searching for meaning in a solitary marathon but through the everyday rhythms of loss and love.
As a literary voice with international acclaim and a conscience rooted in Nigeria’s diasporic experience, Adichie has explored the complexity of the beliefs, values and societal norms piercing the African womanhood. Her oeuvre utters a soundscape where genuine connections are scarce, while cultural expectations are confronted by the existential dilemma of being yourself, no matter the judgment of the external glance. In her latest novel, published this year in March, the texture of retracing memories becomes a polychromatic chant, fractured, almost disintegrated, yet powerful. The result is a lament that speaks directly to the reader’s sense of self, unravelling a musical score composed from the invisible longing for genuine connection.
Adichie’s relevance lies in her persistent portrayal of how personal grief becomes political in a world stratified by race, class, and cultural division. Dream Count is a book of the present, but also a murmuring meditation on unspoken, inherited wounds that endure long after the postcolonial moment, echoing across other geographies shaped by similar historical trajectories.
Narrating the Pandemics
Set during the early tides of the pandemic, Dream Count follows Chiamaka, a Nigerian writer who seeks refuge from the viral stormfront in her suburban Maryland home, as she battles insomnia, writer’s block, and the ceaseless existential question of being while revisiting with acute criticism her own past. Through an undulating narrative that uproots memories, dreams, video calls, fears and fantasies, the book sketches the emotional tempest of women culturally exiled not only from their homeland but from the certainties that once gave form to their identity.
The narrative style is multivocal. Chiamaka’s voice is accompanied by a chorus of women whose stories echo and counterpoint her own: Zikora, a lawyer navigating single motherhood; Kadiatou, a Guinean cleaner vilified by the media after surviving a sexual assault; Omegolor, a cousin in Abuja running an anonymous advice column for men trying to understand women. Though geographically dispersed, these voices weave a tapestry of modern African identity, bound by shared silences, burdens, and acts of rebellion. They form a symphonic murmur of the collective unconscious, capable of igniting and rekindling forgotten cartographies in a society that no longer makes room for empathetic connections.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie captures Chiamaka’s sentimental dissonance through moments from her relationship with Darnell, a man whose academic ambitions quietly erode the significance of womanhood. Masked by a superficial admiration for strong women, Darnell’s mindset reveals a craving for dominance and emotional minimisation, traits typical of certain chauvinistic men navigating the contradictory and ultimately hollow competition of modern relationships. At the heart of Chiamaka’s turbulent storm lies the tumultuous recollection of her emotional dislocation: what begins as a gentle tide of praise crescendos, tends to fall into a deafening tsunami of control.
As a polyphonic construction, the narrative allows multiple characters to move through its pages, leaving their voices imprinted in their words. A strong wind becomes the manifestation of both the biological and symbolic dimensions of Zikora’s experience of motherhood. As a well-established lawyer, Zikora faces emotional dislocation as she confronts the realities of single motherhood. The narrative often delves into a transcendent understanding of the maternal body and its transformation, at times dissolving into a poetic realm of inner reflection, particularly when dysfunctional parental models give rise to new, unconventional forms of family. Through these stories, the book explores motherhood beyond the stereotypical notion of self-sacrifice, tracing instead a fragile thread of melancholic remembrance, framing motherhood as a site of resistance, pain, and cultural legacy.
Though the structure may appear cacophonic, it mirrors the disordered temporality of lockdown, when days collapsed into one another and emotional states surged in unpredictable crescendos. Through its cumulative rhythm, Dream Count gives form to the formless ache of life in the storm of the pandemic, revealing how humans, even in moments of despair, became each other’s counting threads in the contratempo of the dark, unrelenting rain.
Fragmented Memories
One of Dream Count’s greatest strengths lies in its ability to convey the global pandemic through the intimate textures of language and memory. Adichie eludes didacticism, instead trusting the reader to find meaning in the silences, repetitions, and sudden tonal shifts. This literary polyphony, reminiscent of musical fugues, enables the reader to experience the fragmentation and simultaneity of life during a time of crisis. Her use of oral stylistics, repetition, accumulation, and echo roots the text in African literary traditions while keeping it accessible to a broader readership.
Adichie’s stylistic achievement lies in the way their words perform the ritualistic musicality of the Nigerian English. The repetition “I could not write. I could not eat. I could not sleep.” mimics the incantatory texture of oral traditions while evoking the numbing rituals of lockdown. Each chapter is a solitary note that contributes to a greater harmonic whole, with thematic leitmotifs, grief, dislocation, sisterhood, and returning with subtle instrumental variations.
Undoubtedly, diction is the element that constructs the dialogical interconnectedness between characters; it is also the key ingredient, the orchestration deems essential. The multiplicity of syntax, shaped by each character’s personality, guides the reader through the intricacies of their inner confabulations and interactions as fictional beings who evoke rejection, sadness, irritation, or anger. Adichie separates each character’s locus of enunciation to embed both political and geographical perspectives, enriching the nuances of their uniquely fated paths.
Yet the book is not without its limitations. The prose style, deliberately simple and at times verging on the unpunctuated, may alienate readers who expect a more traditional or formally structured literary style. From a narratological perspective, Dream Count could be seen as a new act of speech that departs from the subterranean complexity often present in the work of Adichie’s contemporaries. The narrative follows a seemingly superficial and episodic sequence, organised around the Persona, the name of each character, which may align more naturally with theatrical or cinematographic modes. In this structure, ellipses occur more organically, and narrative circularity becomes a matter of lived experience rather than formal design. This invites reflection on enduring questions. Is contemporary literature still bound to linearity, or has it moved towards embracing irresolution and the absence of conventional plot?
While such questions are far from new, reading Dream Count brings them into renewed focus. At moments, one may wonder whether the book functions as a novel or as a loosely connected collection of short stories. Arguably, readers with a preference for classical narrative forms might find this lack of clarity challenging. The absence of narrative resolution mirrors the inertia and uncertainty the work seeks to portray. While this may be artistically justified, it can render the reading experience somewhat fatiguing, especially for those seeking narrative closure. Nonetheless, these limitations do not diminish the book’s central achievement: articulating the unspoken costs of modern womanhood and the quiet revolutions enacted through friendship and memory.
In Dream Count, Adichie has crafted a polyphonic memoir that reads like a fugue of feminine resilience, each voice entering and exiting with aching precision. The book’s refusal to offer closure is its greatest political gesture: grief, after all, does not follow narrative conventions. Instead, the text proposes that being heard, counted, and remembered is itself a form of healing. This is a work that transcends genres: it is part memoir, part sentimental treatise, and part literary experiment. For scholars of postcolonial literature, gender studies, and contemporary African voices, Dream Count is a rich resource. For women, especially culturally exiled, navigating diasporic identities, it is a mirror and a companion. Though its structure and style may frustrate readers seeking plot-driven clarity, Dream Count rewards those willing to listen to its layered polyphony. In a world increasingly desensitised to both suffering and solidarity, Adichie reminds us: to count dreams is to acknowledge the human will to endure and to connect.
