My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (1986) - Plot & Excerpts
How do you review a book when you are not confident that you have the toolset to understand it? Perhaps that is where you start.I've never read a book like this before.My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a fascinating adventure through the landscape of a mysterious civilization hidden in the West African forest. It contains short adventures, all of which are entirely unbelievable, but each containing within itself some story or suggestion about life, danger, economy, human relations, trust, and "the other". I think that is, of course, the point, and, of course, you could look back at this as a collection of parables that have been banded together in some mist-like manner. In fact, I would suggest that the approach is somewhat in line with Don Quixote, though, based on what little I know of the author, I doubt he had read that book. Perhaps that great accomplishment of the Western canon is less astonishing than we think.While I was reading this, I often thought that an illustrated edition would be really quite special. I even had brief glimpses of a film directed by Hayao Miyazaki capturing the flow from one nightmare to another and giving it some consistency. The imagery here is wonderful, and it really engaged my imagination. I don't think that is true of stories that settle into realism - at least not in the same way.What struck me as quite bizarre about this book was the pacing. I couldn't make sense of the pacing whatsoever. There is not effort to meditate on the stories - that is left up to the reader - and, as a result, the adventure thrusts itself forward before the reader is ready to continue onwards. Again, I think that is part of the point. Again, I think that might be part of the point. After all, after reading the introduction (which is quite poorly done) my sense is that the book is structured to mimic stories shared over a campfire, wisdom found not in the story-teller so much as in the story itself. Does this make sense? I'm not sure - I'm definitely not a child of an oral tradition (and this often disappoints me).In the end, it is the pacing that really throws off my ability to give this book a better rating, though I really enjoyed reading it and think it is quite fascinating (and worthy of some serious study - somebody somewhere must have done some work on this, right?). It made me use my brain in different ways than most literature, and I'm grateful for that. I'll maybe even read it again some day. It contains many mysteries, and many stories, that I wouldn't mind parsing out. Before I do that, though, I'll likely read Tutuola's other work, The Palm-Wine Drinkered, and see if it, maybe, helps me understand the approach used in this book.Recommended for those interested in exploring a totally different method of story-telling. An exciting and interesting, though often grotesque, adventure. Prepare to be perplexed.
I might come back to a fuller review, and I will say that if you must pick one Tutuola book, pick "The Palmwine Drinkard" (five stars from me) over this one. For now I just felt compelled to record that this is a darkly imaginative and funny saga set in the West African idea of a chthonic "bush' where the real and spirit worlds intermingle, using a broken English with elements of Nigerian Pidgin, but largely Tutuola's fantastic, poetical idiolect. For other books that might better suit the unadventurous Western lib arts educated dabbler and that work with the cosmological idea of a "bush of ghosts," read Helen Oyeyemi or Nnedi Okoroafor. You might "get" Tutuola and enjoy his writing, or you might hate it, just as with any unusual author. But I do want to address the egotistical numpties who say stupid things such as "people who like this book are only working out their colonialist guilt." Tutuola's is an unique, iconic and magical work, and no more primitive than, say, Ulysses. It's just prose, people. And it has the great advantage that you will discover very quickly whether or not you like it, and you can always put the book down and leave it for others to enjoy.
What do You think about My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (1986)?
Reading somewhat like an African Odyssey - after getting lost in the Bush of Ghosts as a 7 year old boy running away from slavers the narrator takes 24 years to find his way home - the story has the hallucinatory strangeness of folklore and myth. Some of the characters are fantastic - the Flash-Eyed Mother in particular - and worthy of a Studio Ghibli production. An anthropologist's and Jungian's dream of a book. One star off though for the slightly flat style. Whether that's due to trying to find an authentic African voice for the child narrator or down to a lack of technique from the author I don't know.
—Paul
This is a strange, even unsettling book. It's so far out of my usual depth of experience that I have barely any ideas on what to say. It might be lumped in with 'magical realism' though that term seems more and more inadequate. This old edition uses the insulting word 'primitive', but almost as a form of praise. This is a sort of Bildungsroman where a young boy flees bands of slave-traders and hides in the African bush. The land is populated by strange ghosts (here meaning spirits, not only the deceased), with freakish forms and unknown motives. There's one without eyes, without hands, one who is decorated with scorpions for rings and a snake-belt. Their names, too, are strange - 'Skulls', 'Give and Take', 'H.M. The King of the Bush of Ghosts'. The boy himself changes. He takes animal form. He is mistaken for a ghosts' dead father, he grows eyes and becomes a god. He is buried alive by the spider-eaters, he marries a woman who was once an antelope. Tutuola's language is direct yet unusual - partly the result of his limited formal education, partly from local oral traditions. He describes this supernatural world directly, matter-of-factly. What can I call this? It might be 'fantasy', but that too is a limiting word for it. It's weird and never boring.
—Hadrian
