I have a question, after finishing this book: how can I go back to living my daily work life? This masterpiece of imagery and language made me question everything about the capitalist machine.The story of the boy Azaro and his family's struggle in a poor neighborhood somewhere in Nigeria shuttles readers between the real world and the spirit world and interweaves the two in any given scene. The boy's father (who transforms himself into a mystically powered boxer named "Black Tyger") and mother teach him through fables not unlike the boy's own travel among people and spirits. They're poor, but principled. The father resists all attempts to make him compromise his ideals, however drunk he may get or unfair he may act. The mother works doggedly and somehow always finds the time and energy to cook and clean for her husband and son. The boy defies his spirit friends, rejects their constant offers of paradise, and remains with his poor parents to love them and be loved by them and do his best to abide their wishes. It's a story of the strength of family in the face of unstoppable forces pushing against them: landlords and politicians and poor, sometimes parasitic neighbors all around them.To me, Ben Okri's depiction of the living world anticipates utter chaos and ruin. Azaro's family and perhaps his entire village cannot survive without the help of some major event. His father and mother can hardly keep up with bills well enough to feed their son and themselves. Black Tyger's boxing fame, developed through extreme training and eating habits and whatever aid he receives from the spirit world, seems to be the family's only chance to escape from the daily grind that leaves them physically and emotionally exhausted, and still broke. I can't help but imagine many an American ghetto where people feel trapped, like their only options are to become a superstar athlete or resort to thieving or worse. Madame Koto, an intriguing character for her secretiveness, strength, and the way the others in the village speculate about her powers and habits, presents readers with another option: the successful small business person, with her popular bar serving drinks, famous pepper soup, and eventually concubines. She essentially betrays her people to rise in wealth and power, supporting the party of the rich while her constituents are all poor. She comes to hate herself and show no mercy for the desperate beggars who steal from her.My favorite scene is the one in which a "great herbalist" comes to bless Madame Koto's car (she's the only person in the village rich enough to own a car). He begins by speaking of the car as being very safe, then, as he gets drunk, correctly predicts it will become a coffin. In his drunken selfishness, though, he loses all credibility by telling the crowd he can prevent the car from reaching its fate as a coffin if Madame Koto will "give" him one of her concubines. I found this hilarious, the herbalist like a corrupt preacher. He eventually sounds off on how "They" are destroying Africa and that "selfishness is eating up the world." I can only take his "they" to be capitalist aligned politicians who allow the destruction of forests and exploitation of the people. I just love how the herbalist cannot ward off his own selfish desires just as he explains the fate of the selfish world.I loved this book. I'm not doing justice to the fun of reading Okri's very unique and intelligent style. He may not provide the answers for us in today's living world, but he made me think hard about where we're headed. He made me worry and laugh at the same time.
In the month since I've finished The Famished Road it's managed to become less appealing and the worse parts have stuck more strongly in my mind. So I dropped it from three stars to two. I hate disliking books, so here's my attempt at articulating its weaknesses. Okri has some really well developed characters in here. Azaro's father is conflicted, torn between his natural viciousness and his desire to be gentle and kind to his family. The photographer is a great political symbol. Azaro himself is fascinating, charismatic and funny. His voice is unique, and his unreliable nature felt fresh. But the women in this book are bland caricatures. Madame Koto is the woman who dares to be successful. As she tries to bring something new in with her bar, she keeps getting cast as greedy and self serving. Okri also goes too far into her appearance. As she is consumed by her greed, she gets described more as fat and ugly than anything else. As Azaro's mother becomes more selfless and kind, she gets called beautiful and thin. Neither woman really lives outside of her role and it's frustrating to see them so lazily written next to interesting men. Stylistically, Okri keeps within his well defined borders as well. The claustrophobic staccato rhythms initially seemed powerful, but over the course of 500 some odd pages they felt gritty for the sake of being gritty. The constant need to be sharp and stinging felt heavy handed, since every single moment was supposed to seem like some big ordeal. There's no tension when everything is so grating, which made it hard for me to want to read on. Many of the scenes only made this problem worse. There was no reason to add many of the vignettes, because while each had strength on its own, together they felt redundant. Azaro gets kidnapped by the spirits a good five or six times, each abduction pretty much identical to the last. The government sabotages the poor working class every other page. These are pieces of writing that are undeniably important to write, but the sheer excess of them undermines the believability of the novel. Many times, The Famished Road came off as a soap opera pulling cheap tricks for some emotional reaction. It's a shame too, because the first 50 or so, and the last 80 pages are moving and original, but there is just too little in the middle to support them.
What do You think about The Famished Road (1993)?
5 stars.....a monstrously beautiful piece of literature....a must read before you dieDecided to add two comments thatI gave to two Goodreads friends since I wrote such a flimsy little fragments in 2013 (when I was not writing reviews)"This book is so unbelievable. I have never read a book that was like one long dream sequence full of wonder, beauty and ugliness. It is incredible. This is in my top ten books of all time""You will die from the wonder. I cannot put into words the impact this book has had on me. I ponder on it frequently. It is one of those books that I really cannot believe was written by human means."
—Jaidee
I read an excerpt from the first few pages of this book during a literature course, immediately fell in love, and knew I had to read the rest of it. I was so excited when I finally managed to lay my hands on a copy at the library. The prose was lush, evocative, and beautiful. I loved the way the mundanity (which was vivid and never really mundane) was interspersed with brief, surreal episodes. And then, after the first 50 pages or so......I got so tired. The richness of the prose started off magical, but page after page of it became so cloying I had to read the chapters in short bursts. Perhaps that's the way this book was meant to be read so the beauty of it can be properly savoured. But for someone who often power-reads her way through a book during the course of a lazy afternoon, I found the book a long, tiring read that I wasn't sorry to finish.
—Linette
The reviews say things like, "you've never read a novel like this before"; Winner of the Booker Prize, etc. Well, sometimes you want to read a little magical realism, right? Like you are yearning to re-read Cien Años de Solidad by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and I also feel like that sometimes. But I only gave this book three stars because it is 500+ pages of this: "Mesmerized by the cobalt shadows, the paradoxical ultramarine air, and the silver glances of the dead, I listened to the hard images of joy."Really, I mean, come on. Couldn't you just paste that sentence onto any one of the 500 pages and leave it there? Since, although it sounds beautiful if you read it aloud, the reader may ask whether the words have any meaning? I can tell you that the narrative portion of the story is not concerned with color names, or how to pick out paint, or about painting, really or etymology of the naming of different shades of blue, or anything like that. (Basically, the tale is a rather disjointed account of a boy wandering around hallucinating and once in a while decribing his father in slightly varying degrees of drunkenness and the lady down the street maybe involved in some kind of voodoo, somewhere in Africa.)So it is sort of entertaining, if you are in the mood.
—Shawn
