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The Famished Road Trilogy #1
The Famished Road
Winner of the Man Booker “Okri shares with García Márquez a vision of the world as one of infinite possibility. . . . A masterpiece” (The Boston Sunday Globe). Azaro is a spirit child, an abiku, existing, according to the African tradition, between life and death. Born into the human world, he must experience its joys and tragedies. His spirit companions come to him often, hounding him to leave his mortal world and join them in their idyllic one. Azaro foresees a trying life ahead, but he is born smiling. This is his story. When President Bill Clinton first went to Africa he quoted from The Famished Road, which has inspired literature, art, politics, and pop songs—and even been referenced in an episode of The Simpsons. A transformative story for all ages and all times, it means many things to many people. Few contemporary novels have aroused as much passion as this one. Indeed, twenty-five years after its breakout publication, the iconic story of Azaro’s travels continues to mesmerize new generations. For readers of Things Fall Apart or One Hundred Years of Solitude, this Man Booker Prize–winning blend of fabulism and gritty realism by the Nigerian author of Astonishing the Gods and Dangerous Love is a “dazzling, hypnotic” journey through Africa that “weaves the humblest detail with the most extravagant flight of fancy to create an astonishing fictional tapestry” (San Francisco Chronicle). Already considered a classic of world literature, it is “a masterpiece if ever one existed” (The Boston Sunday Globe).
594 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1991
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29172 people want to read
About the author
Ben Okri
86 books996 followersPoet and novelist Ben Okri was born in 1959 in Minna, northern Nigeria, to an Igbo mother and Urhobo father. He grew up in London before returning to Nigeria with his family in 1968. Much of his early fiction explores the political violence that he witnessed at first hand during the civil war in Nigeria. He left the country when a grant from the Nigerian government enabled him to read Comparative Literature at Essex University in England.
He was poetry editor for West Africa magazine between 1983 and 1986 and broadcast regularly for the BBC World Service between 1983 and 1985. He was appointed Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge in 1991, a post he held until 1993. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1987, and was awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Westminster (1997) and Essex (2002).
His first two novels, Flowers and Shadows (1980) and The Landscapes Within (1981), are both set in Nigeria and feature as central characters two young men struggling to make sense of the disintegration and chaos happening in both their family and country. The two collections of stories that followed, Incidents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the New Curfew (1988), are set in Lagos and London.
In 1991 Okri was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Famished Road (1991). Set in a Nigerian village, this is the first in a trilogy of novels which tell the story of Azaro, a spirit child. Azaro's narrative is continued in Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998). Other recent fiction includes Astonishing the Gods (1995) and Dangerous Love (1996), which was awarded the Premio Palmi (Italy) in 2000. His latest novels are In Arcadia (2002) and Starbook (2007).
A collection of poems, An African Elegy, was published in 1992, and an epic poem, Mental Flight, in 1999. A collection of essays, A Way of Being Free, was published in 1997. Ben Okri is also the author of a play, In Exilus.
In his latest book, Tales of Freedom (2009), Okri brings together poetry and story.
Ben Okri is a Vice-President of the English Centre of International PEN, a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre, and was awarded an OBE in 2001. He lives in London.
He was poetry editor for West Africa magazine between 1983 and 1986 and broadcast regularly for the BBC World Service between 1983 and 1985. He was appointed Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge in 1991, a post he held until 1993. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1987, and was awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Westminster (1997) and Essex (2002).
His first two novels, Flowers and Shadows (1980) and The Landscapes Within (1981), are both set in Nigeria and feature as central characters two young men struggling to make sense of the disintegration and chaos happening in both their family and country. The two collections of stories that followed, Incidents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the New Curfew (1988), are set in Lagos and London.
In 1991 Okri was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Famished Road (1991). Set in a Nigerian village, this is the first in a trilogy of novels which tell the story of Azaro, a spirit child. Azaro's narrative is continued in Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998). Other recent fiction includes Astonishing the Gods (1995) and Dangerous Love (1996), which was awarded the Premio Palmi (Italy) in 2000. His latest novels are In Arcadia (2002) and Starbook (2007).
A collection of poems, An African Elegy, was published in 1992, and an epic poem, Mental Flight, in 1999. A collection of essays, A Way of Being Free, was published in 1997. Ben Okri is also the author of a play, In Exilus.
In his latest book, Tales of Freedom (2009), Okri brings together poetry and story.
Ben Okri is a Vice-President of the English Centre of International PEN, a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre, and was awarded an OBE in 2001. He lives in London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,143 reviews
April 1, 2020
This book almost broke me and ate me.
I went to bed after reading the first twenty pages of it and I dreamt about chasing an antelope with a broken horn which jumped out the window. I, in turn, was being chased by a wild boar covered in blood which spoke in a human voice. There was also a flying carpet.
I don't really like magical realism but this book didn't care. I was gonna have it whether I liked it or not. It swept me away before I knew it. By the end of it I would read about a man who slept for two months and not bat an eye. Only a little later I would think: wait a minute, people can't sleep for two months straight! That's not possible, they have to eat and stuff!
As any other book of magical realism "The Famished Road" is elliptical. The characters go through a never-ending cycles of death and rebirth. It suits so well the postcolonial literature of Africa and Latin America because it represents the hopelessness and desperation of poverty and mirrors the situation of these fairly new countries that always seem to be going back to square one. It's a never-ending struggle of the same eternal forces that always seems to end in a draw.
This is really the story that Azaro, the so called 'spirit child' tells us. He is a child who doesn't want to stay on this Earth and longs for death. He constantly fights the desire to join his companions from the spirit world. It's only the love of his mother that keeps him fighting back this temptation. It takes him about 500 pages to finally develop a hunger for life even in this miserable postcolonial reality.
The book is full of symbolism as you would expect but there is also a lot of humour, some political satire and vibrant characters like the powerful bar owner Madame Koto.
It's beautifully written and it is hypnotic. It is also heart-breaking and devastating. And yes, it could be easily at least 200 pages shorter, but I enjoyed reading it even if it left me drained and hallucinating. I wanted it to end and I didn't want it to end.
I realise it is a love it or hate it kind of book and frankly I don't mind if you hate it. I feel very possessive and jealous about it.
The only reason I haven't given it five stars is because I don't see myself rereading it. It would probably drive me mad.
I went to bed after reading the first twenty pages of it and I dreamt about chasing an antelope with a broken horn which jumped out the window. I, in turn, was being chased by a wild boar covered in blood which spoke in a human voice. There was also a flying carpet.
I don't really like magical realism but this book didn't care. I was gonna have it whether I liked it or not. It swept me away before I knew it. By the end of it I would read about a man who slept for two months and not bat an eye. Only a little later I would think: wait a minute, people can't sleep for two months straight! That's not possible, they have to eat and stuff!
As any other book of magical realism "The Famished Road" is elliptical. The characters go through a never-ending cycles of death and rebirth. It suits so well the postcolonial literature of Africa and Latin America because it represents the hopelessness and desperation of poverty and mirrors the situation of these fairly new countries that always seem to be going back to square one. It's a never-ending struggle of the same eternal forces that always seems to end in a draw.
This is really the story that Azaro, the so called 'spirit child' tells us. He is a child who doesn't want to stay on this Earth and longs for death. He constantly fights the desire to join his companions from the spirit world. It's only the love of his mother that keeps him fighting back this temptation. It takes him about 500 pages to finally develop a hunger for life even in this miserable postcolonial reality.
The book is full of symbolism as you would expect but there is also a lot of humour, some political satire and vibrant characters like the powerful bar owner Madame Koto.
It's beautifully written and it is hypnotic. It is also heart-breaking and devastating. And yes, it could be easily at least 200 pages shorter, but I enjoyed reading it even if it left me drained and hallucinating. I wanted it to end and I didn't want it to end.
I realise it is a love it or hate it kind of book and frankly I don't mind if you hate it. I feel very possessive and jealous about it.
The only reason I haven't given it five stars is because I don't see myself rereading it. It would probably drive me mad.
October 31, 2015
They wanted to know the essence of pain, they wanted to suffer, to feel, to love, to hate, to be greater than hate, and to be imperfect in order to always have something to strive towards, which is beauty. They wanted also to know wonder and to live miracles. Death is too perfect.
The road thirsts for libations of blood and tears and sucks into its inescapable vortex, parables of imperialist avarice and remnants of broken dreams. It cuts across the acropolis of untold agonies, eavesdropping on circular conversations, witness to the absurd manoeuvrings of the 'Party of the Rich' and the 'Party of the Poor', audience to the familiar hysterics of Azaro's mum and Madame Koto ruing deaths and reversals of fortune, to the sounds of laughter and merriment emanating from the mass of rowdy gatherings, winding its way in and around the heart of an anonymous African nation submerged in the septic pool of 'third world' squalor and privations.
The road accompanies Azaro, his 'mum' and 'dad' on their unending excursions into realms - known and unknown - transporting them across the rim separating reality and illusion, reinstilling in them a desire for the sweet torment of mortal life as opposed to the calm inviolate certainty afforded by the dimension of spirits. Unspooling like an exponentially lengthening thread, the road girds itself around all human conflict - past, present, and future. The road is human history itself, a ravenous beast intent on devouring existential agonies, grief, bitterness, hope, happiness, and ambition, crushing penury and incertitude and spitting back monstrosities that ravage and soothe in turn. The road teaches the abiku child to endure disease and death, condemning him to a cycle of endless reincarnations till a time comes when all historical wrongs will be rectified.
They keep coming and going till their time is right.
There is a reason Marquez and Rushdie have sought magical realism as their preferred facade to convey the truth of a reality that is too multitudinous and immense to be grasped all at once. Like Rushdie's India and Marquez's Macondo, Okri's phantasmagorical dystopia reflects the real in the surreal, alluding to multifarious truths through strategically positioned symbols and metaphors. Deformed one-eyed monsters, forest spirits, homunculi and humans rendezvous while pouring themselves palm-wine from calabashes, characters drift in and out of dreams with the ease of changing trains at a station, life becomes an interminable travesty of farcical repetitions interspersed with brief interludes of small triumphs and bigger setbacks. Near death experiences, disease, natural calamities, political unrest keep making reappearances like unwanted guests. The stink of hunger and need cling to the community like a persistent shadow. But in this black hole of innumerable woes, the love of home and family becomes a placebo assuaging the pain of small everyday injustices. Okri writes with the full knowledge that ghetto life in the 'third world' is a prolonged, futile battle against countless indignities and yet this same life is never bereft of a hopeless kind of joy.
I wanted the liberty of limitations, to have to find or create new roads from this one which is so hungry, this road of our refusal to be. I was not necessarily the stronger one; it may be easier to live with the earth's boundaries than to be free in infinity.
It might be easy to dismiss this as an exercize in trotting out a one-trick pony. But a little more effort yields a magnificent view through the gauzy mesh of short, stumpy sentences that proliferate to create a unique kind of prose-poetry generously offering a multisensorial experience for the reader. One can glimpse the astounding beauty of a world combating ugly realities at every turn with humour and an understated bravery. The snippets of wisdom dispersed unevenly between the arrays of grotesquely beautiful images, despite their garb of a seemingly simplistic idiolect, jolt one into a renewed awareness of their import.
He saw the world in which black people always suffered and he didn't like it.
The beauty of this work overwhelmed my senses in ways I cannot properly express. The colonizer's language you see. Sometimes it can be strangely disempowering despite affording its users with currency. Yet the Arundhati Roys and the Amos Tutuolas and the Ngugi wa Thiong'os have subverted the conventions of this very English to carve out their own englishes because a writer needs a newer breed of language to broadcast the fact of less popularized truths. Okri has managed to do just that with elan. And it's time the erstwhile empire writes back to address that which has still remained unaddressed and underrepresented in world literature. In the diction of its preference.
...no story could ever be finished.
March 7, 2016
Just didn’t feel the love for this. I hate long accounts of dreams in novels and magical realism can be like reading an endless succession of dreams. I like the laws of gravity to hold fast in the novels I read so this started off at a big disadvantage where my reading preferences are concerned (One of the few novels I’ve ever failed to finish is Midnight's Children).
In short, this is a novel about an African community struggling and failing to be born, the community a microcosm of Africa itself. As a subject this poses huge plot problems – the one step forward, two steps backwards dynamic – and I never felt Okri mastered this problem of momentum. The novel kept collapsing in on itself for me. My feeling was it could have been a fabulous 200 page novella but at 500 pages (prerequisite length to win the Booker prize!) it severely tested my patience. There was a sense throughout of groundhog day. The same things seemed to happen over and over again. The characters repeated themselves to the point where it felt to me the entire novel was running on the spot. It felt like continually picking up the Go To Jail Monopoly card – do not pass go, do not collect £200. I reckon you could skip 100 pages and it wouldn’t jolt you too noticeably out of the continuity of the narrative. I also found the writing self-indulgent at times.
I did however like the real world stuff. The spirit boy Azaro’s family life with his mother and father was great and there were some lovely moments of family solidarity and tenderness. And there’s a fresh and innocent vibrancy to Okri’s voice except when he gets carried away with his exotic metaphors and mystifications.
In short, this is a novel about an African community struggling and failing to be born, the community a microcosm of Africa itself. As a subject this poses huge plot problems – the one step forward, two steps backwards dynamic – and I never felt Okri mastered this problem of momentum. The novel kept collapsing in on itself for me. My feeling was it could have been a fabulous 200 page novella but at 500 pages (prerequisite length to win the Booker prize!) it severely tested my patience. There was a sense throughout of groundhog day. The same things seemed to happen over and over again. The characters repeated themselves to the point where it felt to me the entire novel was running on the spot. It felt like continually picking up the Go To Jail Monopoly card – do not pass go, do not collect £200. I reckon you could skip 100 pages and it wouldn’t jolt you too noticeably out of the continuity of the narrative. I also found the writing self-indulgent at times.
I did however like the real world stuff. The spirit boy Azaro’s family life with his mother and father was great and there were some lovely moments of family solidarity and tenderness. And there’s a fresh and innocent vibrancy to Okri’s voice except when he gets carried away with his exotic metaphors and mystifications.
May 23, 2013
A boy sat down to read a book, but when he looked closely, it was not a book, but a person. The person had green skin and roller-skates for eyes. A lizard with a head as big as the moon scuttled over and sniffed the green-skinned person. "What are you looking at?" the person asked the boy. "I thought you were a book," the boy said. "No," the person said, "I am a metaphor or magical realism or some shit. I dunno. But I have roller-skates for eyes, that's pretty cool." The boy shrugs. "You're mum is a metaphor," he said. Then he yawned and before too long, he was asleep. When he woke up the book that had became a person was now a midget with alligator legs, and the midget sat on the back of a parakeet with five heads. This sort of crap continued for what felt like five thousand pages, with occasional glacially paced plot movement, until the boy blew his brains out with a shotgun, except it wasn't a shotgun, it was a feather duster, and sadly, the boy had to live on. The end.
January 20, 2025
This Booker winner was different than any of the others I've read. Full of spirits and strange creature, sprinkled with African folklore and violence. This is the part I loved about this novel and what made go through it. Reading this was not easy because of the writing. It was too fragmented. There was no flow. Short sentences. blah, blah stop. blah, blah, stop. There were moments when I thought i was reading a telegram or something. Then the writing improved slightly then it went again driving me insane. Also, the plot was repetitive. Kid gets kidnapped and then saved. Repeat.
August 20, 2015
5 stars.....a monstrously beautiful piece of literature....a must read before you die
Decided 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."
Decided 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."
April 11, 2013
Towards the end of the book, in Chapter 12 of Book 7, the author states quite clearly what seems to be his intended message:
The spirit-child is an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into the dreams of the living and the dead. Things that are not ready, not willing to be borne or to become, things for which adequate preparations have not been made to sustain their momentous births, things that are not resolved, things bound up with failure and with fear of being, they all keep recurring, keep coming back, and in themselves partake of the spirit-child’s condition. They keep coming and going till their time is right. History itself fully demonstrates how things of the world partake of the condition of the spirit-child.
There are many who are of this condition and do not know it. There are many nations, civilizations, ideas, half-discoveries, revolutions, loves, art forms, experiments, and historical events that are of this condition and do not know it. There are many people too. They do not all have the marks of their recurrence. Often they seem normal. Often they are perceived of as new. Often they are serene with the familiarity of death’s embrace. They all carry strange gifts in their souls. They are all part-time dwellers in their own secret moonlight. They all yearn to make of themselves a beautiful sacrifice, a difficult sacrifice, to bring transformation, and to die shedding Light within this life, setting the matter Ready for their true beginnings to cry into being, scorched by the strange ecstasy of the will ascending to say yes to destiny and illumination.
This is a very ambitious aim. But I am afraid that my reading of the novel failed to conjure up these lofty goals.
Believe me. I really wanted to like this book with a five stars intensity. It has been on my shelves for years, and friends have borrowed and loved it. I have read other books that use magical portrayals and I have liked most of them. I think that I am perceptive of the power that magic, myth and chimeras have in portraying a difficult reality. Distorting the world and our perceptions is an effective glass for seeing the way brutality, poverty, famine, insalubrious habitat, and coercive violence distort humanity.
But the truth is that I found the continuous use of imagery in Famished Road trying, erratic, pointless, and therefore somewhat predictable. And that, I fear, is the opposite of the effect it should have had. At the beginning I was enthralled by the powerful images but gradually I began to find the rhythm of the sentences somewhat disconnected. It read as a succession of detached shots, which in a staccato style seemed jarring to my eyes and failed to produce any sense of flow. And in addition, there was too much addition. This book is just too long, with pages and pages of weird images embedded in trite episodes.
May be I should offer an apology, for I suspect that, as it happens in other unfortunate occasions, the timing of my reading was wrong. It is as if books functioned in waves and sometimes our brains cannot tune in properly to the appropriate wave length.
The book description in GR places this book in the genre of Magical Realism, and mentions two other obvious representatives, García Márquez Gabriel and Salman Rushdie. From what I have read from these writers, they use fantasy to draw attention to the incongruous of a particular society or country, without falling into an exploitation of the imagery per se.
These two writers were not, however, those who came to my mind as more successful artificers in using hallucinatory poetry to depict suffering. The one book that kept coming to my mind, when the succession of idiosyncratic images and endless strings of spirits got on my nerves, was Beloved (1987-Pulitzer). In this amazing book Toni Morrison is less ambitious than Okri, and tackles just one real event, the Margaret Garner (1850s) case. But her images and language in Beloved succeed in dislocating one’s frame of mind and in recreating the abominations and grief of that despairing episode. Her denunciation of injustice in racial prejudices necessarily hits home.
In reading Famished Road one wishes to recognize Nigeria, or at least somewhere in Africa, but at the end all this writing offered me no awakening visions. I did not learn much or take consciousness of the plights of this country as I did when I read Wole Soyinka.
Famished Road is the first of three in the Abiku Trilogy and won the 1991 Booker. The sequels are Songs of Enchantment, and Infinite Riches, but given my only 3 stars, I will proceed no further.
But so as not to leave a dissonant melody, I will leave you with a nice quote by James Purdon in The Observer review. He probably tuned in a lot better than I did.
Okri's novel – the first part of a trilogy – brought forward his distinctive brand of magical realism, but it also raised questions about some of the conventions of Anglo-African postcolonial writing. Is the abiku a youthful spirit – a Pan who sees the world in its full strangeness and plenitude – or one of Nigeria's displaced children, cut off from a culture far richer than the material world of his birth? What does it mean for us to stay, like Azaro, in the "world of the living" while reading this lush prose, full to bursting with fruits and seeds, palm wine and precious stones? "Our hunger can change the world," Azaro's father tells him, "make it better, sweeter." Okri's novel hungers for variety, for compassion and hope – and for an art that might make a feast out of famine.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/...
The spirit-child is an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into the dreams of the living and the dead. Things that are not ready, not willing to be borne or to become, things for which adequate preparations have not been made to sustain their momentous births, things that are not resolved, things bound up with failure and with fear of being, they all keep recurring, keep coming back, and in themselves partake of the spirit-child’s condition. They keep coming and going till their time is right. History itself fully demonstrates how things of the world partake of the condition of the spirit-child.
There are many who are of this condition and do not know it. There are many nations, civilizations, ideas, half-discoveries, revolutions, loves, art forms, experiments, and historical events that are of this condition and do not know it. There are many people too. They do not all have the marks of their recurrence. Often they seem normal. Often they are perceived of as new. Often they are serene with the familiarity of death’s embrace. They all carry strange gifts in their souls. They are all part-time dwellers in their own secret moonlight. They all yearn to make of themselves a beautiful sacrifice, a difficult sacrifice, to bring transformation, and to die shedding Light within this life, setting the matter Ready for their true beginnings to cry into being, scorched by the strange ecstasy of the will ascending to say yes to destiny and illumination.
This is a very ambitious aim. But I am afraid that my reading of the novel failed to conjure up these lofty goals.
Believe me. I really wanted to like this book with a five stars intensity. It has been on my shelves for years, and friends have borrowed and loved it. I have read other books that use magical portrayals and I have liked most of them. I think that I am perceptive of the power that magic, myth and chimeras have in portraying a difficult reality. Distorting the world and our perceptions is an effective glass for seeing the way brutality, poverty, famine, insalubrious habitat, and coercive violence distort humanity.
But the truth is that I found the continuous use of imagery in Famished Road trying, erratic, pointless, and therefore somewhat predictable. And that, I fear, is the opposite of the effect it should have had. At the beginning I was enthralled by the powerful images but gradually I began to find the rhythm of the sentences somewhat disconnected. It read as a succession of detached shots, which in a staccato style seemed jarring to my eyes and failed to produce any sense of flow. And in addition, there was too much addition. This book is just too long, with pages and pages of weird images embedded in trite episodes.
May be I should offer an apology, for I suspect that, as it happens in other unfortunate occasions, the timing of my reading was wrong. It is as if books functioned in waves and sometimes our brains cannot tune in properly to the appropriate wave length.
The book description in GR places this book in the genre of Magical Realism, and mentions two other obvious representatives, García Márquez Gabriel and Salman Rushdie. From what I have read from these writers, they use fantasy to draw attention to the incongruous of a particular society or country, without falling into an exploitation of the imagery per se.
These two writers were not, however, those who came to my mind as more successful artificers in using hallucinatory poetry to depict suffering. The one book that kept coming to my mind, when the succession of idiosyncratic images and endless strings of spirits got on my nerves, was Beloved (1987-Pulitzer). In this amazing book Toni Morrison is less ambitious than Okri, and tackles just one real event, the Margaret Garner (1850s) case. But her images and language in Beloved succeed in dislocating one’s frame of mind and in recreating the abominations and grief of that despairing episode. Her denunciation of injustice in racial prejudices necessarily hits home.
In reading Famished Road one wishes to recognize Nigeria, or at least somewhere in Africa, but at the end all this writing offered me no awakening visions. I did not learn much or take consciousness of the plights of this country as I did when I read Wole Soyinka.
Famished Road is the first of three in the Abiku Trilogy and won the 1991 Booker. The sequels are Songs of Enchantment, and Infinite Riches, but given my only 3 stars, I will proceed no further.
But so as not to leave a dissonant melody, I will leave you with a nice quote by James Purdon in The Observer review. He probably tuned in a lot better than I did.
Okri's novel – the first part of a trilogy – brought forward his distinctive brand of magical realism, but it also raised questions about some of the conventions of Anglo-African postcolonial writing. Is the abiku a youthful spirit – a Pan who sees the world in its full strangeness and plenitude – or one of Nigeria's displaced children, cut off from a culture far richer than the material world of his birth? What does it mean for us to stay, like Azaro, in the "world of the living" while reading this lush prose, full to bursting with fruits and seeds, palm wine and precious stones? "Our hunger can change the world," Azaro's father tells him, "make it better, sweeter." Okri's novel hungers for variety, for compassion and hope – and for an art that might make a feast out of famine.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/...
October 20, 2014
An oneiric epic. Phantasmagoria in the bush. One is reminded of Achebe's Things Fall Apart in which the Yoruba myth of the abiku, or spirit child, is so much more darkly rendered. The Famished Road is not so dark a book. It is scary in its way, surely, loaded as it is with its cast of frighteners, but it can also be oddly reassuring in its vivid depiction of the afterlife. Heaven may indeed be a place where nothing ever happens, yes, but as intimated by Okri it is also beautiful, in a Daliesque way, without strife and full of high joy.
Azaro, short for Lazarus, another abiku, and his mum and dad, live in an unnamed city in a modern African state. The community is ensnared in grinding poverty. There has been virtually no education among those in the community. The residents are without the richness of language that might allow them to talk through their problems. Instead there is much acting out, violence, aggression, theft.
Azaro travels back and forth between the spirit world and reality. There is never any doubt in the reader’s mind as to which is which. There might be moments of periodic ambiguity, but Okri always cures these before too long. Is our narrator reliable? Do we believe him? No matter the flights of fancy, his dalliance with the spirit world, we believe that he believes what he experiences is real. Is he self deluded? Maybe. Or perhaps just subject to a too vivid imagination? That is suggested in the last line.
The story is set on the cusp of independence for an African nation like Nigeria, which historically occurred in 1960. The machinations of the newly formed parties are nothing short of criminal. Many, including Mum, a peripatetic seller of common household items, are intimidated to vote the “right way” by the Party of the Rich. Dad, who must work carrying loads on his head (apparently cheaper than forklifts?) grows simultaneously more compassionate and more insane. In desperation he goes from role to role as a means of finding sustenance for his family. First he is a menial worker, then a boxer, a fine one, fighting opponents whose imperviousness depends upon bad magic. Then he is a politician embracing a clan of beggars he cannot support.
There is the local ambitious barkeep, Madame Koto, whose political involvement gradually improves both her fortunes and the decadent offerings she is able to provide her increasingly well-heeled clientele. Her bar becomes an intersection between the living an the dead. She becomes massive, corrupt, physically grotesque. The narrative is sustained almost entirely by way of action. Every sentence describes. We see vividly. The novel has a marvelous cohesion. Is it too long? I think it is. One wishes Okri could have done the task in 400, or even 375 pages, but that was not to be.
Please don't take the bait and read The Famished Road solely as an allegory on the newly independent state of Nigeria. To do so will be to diminish a wildly imaginative and astonishing book to the level of mere parable. The narrative works on many levels. I enjoyed especially as a creative take on the enabling spiritual myths of a people. It provides insight into another world, the primary objective of all great fiction. Highly recommended.
Azaro, short for Lazarus, another abiku, and his mum and dad, live in an unnamed city in a modern African state. The community is ensnared in grinding poverty. There has been virtually no education among those in the community. The residents are without the richness of language that might allow them to talk through their problems. Instead there is much acting out, violence, aggression, theft.
Azaro travels back and forth between the spirit world and reality. There is never any doubt in the reader’s mind as to which is which. There might be moments of periodic ambiguity, but Okri always cures these before too long. Is our narrator reliable? Do we believe him? No matter the flights of fancy, his dalliance with the spirit world, we believe that he believes what he experiences is real. Is he self deluded? Maybe. Or perhaps just subject to a too vivid imagination? That is suggested in the last line.
The story is set on the cusp of independence for an African nation like Nigeria, which historically occurred in 1960. The machinations of the newly formed parties are nothing short of criminal. Many, including Mum, a peripatetic seller of common household items, are intimidated to vote the “right way” by the Party of the Rich. Dad, who must work carrying loads on his head (apparently cheaper than forklifts?) grows simultaneously more compassionate and more insane. In desperation he goes from role to role as a means of finding sustenance for his family. First he is a menial worker, then a boxer, a fine one, fighting opponents whose imperviousness depends upon bad magic. Then he is a politician embracing a clan of beggars he cannot support.
There is the local ambitious barkeep, Madame Koto, whose political involvement gradually improves both her fortunes and the decadent offerings she is able to provide her increasingly well-heeled clientele. Her bar becomes an intersection between the living an the dead. She becomes massive, corrupt, physically grotesque. The narrative is sustained almost entirely by way of action. Every sentence describes. We see vividly. The novel has a marvelous cohesion. Is it too long? I think it is. One wishes Okri could have done the task in 400, or even 375 pages, but that was not to be.
Please don't take the bait and read The Famished Road solely as an allegory on the newly independent state of Nigeria. To do so will be to diminish a wildly imaginative and astonishing book to the level of mere parable. The narrative works on many levels. I enjoyed especially as a creative take on the enabling spiritual myths of a people. It provides insight into another world, the primary objective of all great fiction. Highly recommended.
August 18, 2007
Oh my dear lord, how I hated "The Famished Road". Friends don't let friends read this book. I only finished it because I was trekking in Nepal with no alternative English-language book for miles upon miles. In my personal hell, this is the only book in the library.
February 26, 2018
I am within sight of finishing my occasional project to read all of the Booker winners. I have to say that I have very mixed feelings about this. It is undoubtedly striking and very different to any of the other winners, but it could have been better - for me it seemed too long and a little too self indulgent. The reader is also expected to swallow a lot of African folklore.
There are only four main characters. The narrator Azari is a spirit-child, and at every crisis point he journeys into the spirit world of the forest, into nightmarish scenes populated by weird spirit creatures, who want him to die and return to their world. The other main characters are his parents, referred to simply as Mum and Dad, and Madame Koto, an upwardly mobile bar owner - Azari spends much of his time with her. The human part of the story largely concerns the modernisation of Nigeria in the post-independence period.
Mum and Dad are poor - Mum earns a pittance as a street trader, while Dad is a labourer whose job involves moving heavy sacks, who also becomes a prize-fighter with political ambitions. Without the magic realism and the frequent interventions of spirits and other supernatural events, the story would be a very bleak one, and events seem to move in rather limited circles. However I don't want to be wholly negative, as much of the book is very entertaining and surprisingly readable - I just feel that at nearly 600 pages it outstays its welcome, and it would have been more powerful at half its length. It did not leave me wanting to explore the two sequels.
There are only four main characters. The narrator Azari is a spirit-child, and at every crisis point he journeys into the spirit world of the forest, into nightmarish scenes populated by weird spirit creatures, who want him to die and return to their world. The other main characters are his parents, referred to simply as Mum and Dad, and Madame Koto, an upwardly mobile bar owner - Azari spends much of his time with her. The human part of the story largely concerns the modernisation of Nigeria in the post-independence period.
Mum and Dad are poor - Mum earns a pittance as a street trader, while Dad is a labourer whose job involves moving heavy sacks, who also becomes a prize-fighter with political ambitions. Without the magic realism and the frequent interventions of spirits and other supernatural events, the story would be a very bleak one, and events seem to move in rather limited circles. However I don't want to be wholly negative, as much of the book is very entertaining and surprisingly readable - I just feel that at nearly 600 pages it outstays its welcome, and it would have been more powerful at half its length. It did not leave me wanting to explore the two sequels.
December 5, 2018
The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls.
The linearity of narrative is a relatively recent innovation in storytelling, rather like perspective in painting: it is not integral to the art. Myths, our oldest examples of the narrative art, are not linear. They spread across time and space in all directions, with times past, present and future seamlessly intermingling, and the ‘real’ world cohabiting the ‘imaginary’ one with people travelling across the boundary effortlessly. I think this is more true of the so-called ‘primitive’ societies much more than the ‘civilised’ ones – Africa being the best example.
Ben Okri’s ‘The Famished Road’ has been called a novel written using the techniques of magical realism. I would say that if this magical realism, then it is magical realism on meth. This novel is Kafka meeting Marquez on a canvas prepared by Dali, with a bit of Stephen King added for seasoning. It is a roller-coaster ride into literary madness.
The story – what there is of it – is very simple: Azaro is a ‘spirit child’ from the realm of ethereal beings, who usually remain in the human world for only very short periods before ‘dying’ and returning. But for once, he decides to stay back, even though persuaded incessantly by his spirit companions. In 500 pages, Okri narrates his trials and tribulations as the son of impoverished parents in a piss-poor and corrupt African country, struggling to recover from years of colonial rapacity. As Azaro moves through the surrealist landscape of his intertwined worlds, he is witness to the epochal events gripping his nation.
The reader would be well-advised not to look for logic in this story – there is none. We have a positively cloying richness of metaphor, but to try to interpret it would be to get bogged down in technicalities and mired down in a verbal swamp. Just go with the flow: enjoy the colourful, exhilarating, disgusting and frightening images as they tumble past one’s vision. It’s a symphony orchestra of verbal images – open your inner ears to it.
It is not that there is absolutely no method in this madness: there is. Many metaphors are easily recognised. Azaro’s unnamed Dad and Mum, trying to make ends meet in a ruthlessly capitalist society. The landlord who keeps on increasing the rent of their shanty in the ghetto. The ‘Party of the Poor’ and ‘Party of the Rich’ and their thugs. The photographer who is a hero of the common man and villain of the authorities.
There are also events which are quintessentially African. Dad breaking his back in manual labour to make both ends meet: Mum eking out a precarious living by hawking wares in the bazaar: the two political parties vying for votes with golden promises: Madame Koto’s palm wine bar getting more and more prosperous as her connections with the ‘Party of the Rich’ improve: Dad, ditching his job to try and fulfil his dream of becoming a prize fighter... the demon of hunger constantly driving the common man to reach for the skies, as the tribal and the capitalist worlds collide.
However, what sets this novel apart from the humdrum is the richness of the mythical vein running through the story. Frightening spirits move across the boundary of the world, visible only to Azaro. There is the blind man with his unbearable accordion music, who “sees” with the eyes of children. Grotesquely deformed beggars, who seem to beings existing in both worlds, follow Dad as their leader. And to cap it all, Madame Koto, bloated with a permanent pregnancy and a swollen foot, strides across the narrative like a primal fertility goddess, a distorted Venus of Willendorf.
And then, there are the dreams and the stories, narrated by all and sundry...
***
About three decades back, I used to watch a lot of art movies through our local film society. One director who impressed me was Miklos Jansco from Hungary, whose films did not have a conventional narrative structure. There were very few cuts, and the camera moved fluidly through scenes loosely connected in a narrative structure. It was like watching a prose poem on screen.
Okri’s writing seemed to me the verbal equivalent of Jansco’s visual technique. To enjoy it, you need to put aside the critical part of your brain, and lose yourself in the narrative flow. If you are able to do that, then you will love this novel – otherwise, you will hate it.
July 21, 2022
“In the beginning, there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.”
I remember these lines. These were some of the first literary lines, I had read and memorized. The famished road was among those first books I purchased when I put the thought in place that I wish to read some contemporary English literature. This reading bird had just started fledging around.
Like the continents shift in ‘continental shift’, my copy of the book has also shifted leftward from the bottom. Have a look. It seems it had been constantly rearranging itself on my bookshelf over the past decade; it is precisely ten years old on my shelf. And this cup of tea! This cup of tea I had placed beside it for Azaro. There is no tea in the cup! Did you just say that? Oh, you don’t know, the cup is filled with tea, but you can’t see it, only Azaro will see this.
Don’t you know Azaro?
Azaro is a spirit child; he said he never wanted to be born; being born was a shock for him from which he never recovered. Voices spoke to him day and night, and he realized one day that they were the voices of his spirit companions,
‘What are you doing here?’ one of them would ask.
‘Living’ I would reply.
‘Living for what?’
‘I don’t know.’
Azaro is the narrator of this book, and he will tell you his story. In this mortal world, his mother is a hawker, and his father is a laborer. Madam Koto is a domineering character, she is a bar owner. Azaro was sent to her for work, but he feared her anger and also disliked her customers. Her bar was the only place in the area which had the distinction of electricity; she even modified her bar board to call attention to this fact. Some of the most extraordinary things happen in her bar. One day even the head priest considered her an abomination and referred to her as the ‘Great whore of the apocalypse’.
One day, Azaro’s father decided to become a pugilist, a professional boxer and began to train dementedly, waking at midnight, bob and counter punch, hit and jab at imaginary opponents. He specialized in fighting his own shadow. On the other hand, his mother yelled,
“Poverty is driving me mad”
There are some party politics involved in the story. The dad finally turns politician. The story will go on in this world and another world simultaneously. Azaro will tell you the story of his parents and at the same time, will take you to a market where you will find, the man with red wings, a girl with fish gills, and someone without thumbs will give him a loaf of bread there. When he gets lost, he will ask a giant turtle, I am lost, I want to go home!
Almost a decade back, when I was just beginning my reading journey, this book imparted to me new worldliness and I loved very much the story, especially in the voice of Azaro! At that time I did not even hear the word ‘ magic realism’, but now when I have read some of the major proponents of the genre, I still feel that this book is something!
Robert Fraser wrote in the Independent, that ‘Okri is a patient artist, patient enough to proceed on two levels, for what is manifest to the child is news to us.’ I completely agree.
I liked the writing of Okri, it is simple, nimble, and imaginative!
And Hallucinatory too!
Let's realize this pie in the sky once!
April 29, 2016
For the first 150 pages I was mightily frustrated.
Then came the episode of the poisoned milk, distributed by a political party canvassing for votes
Suddenly the sense of community coalesces. The symbolism speaks. The deceitfulness and peril of whiteness is exposed. It recurs in many guises: from false holiness to naked danger to amulet of enemies.
But Okri would not have us simplify, would not have us make this many-faceted reflection into a parable where every sign has one meaning
And that, I think, is the reason for the profusion of his prose, the reason for the foregoing frustration: it is intended to break the habit of convergent thinkers like me (schooled by an education that punishes failure to alight immediately on correctness, an education that denies the subjectivity of the subject even as it subjects her, an education that sneers at feeling) of seeking the single reading, the one thread of meaning.
The texture of this book is excessive. It is the sensory excess of an overloaded perception, recorded almost without interpretation by its narrator or his interlocutors. That texture can overwhelm. I did not enjoy this book. But the texture is essential; the texture of excess is the device used to create the ambiance of an unfamiliar, unheimlich, heightened experience and to disrupt the reductive will to interpretation. It actively subverts thinking through colonialism
There is no romance about community here. The world we look into is a world of violence, patriarchy, self-interest. But the community is already impacted and fragmented by the workings of imperialism; as is signalled by the tearing-out of the community in the opening scenes. This would be mere accident if it weren’t for the violence heaped upon violence by brutal state and avaricious capitalist. These sources of violence are thus positioned and remain in place throughout the narrative. To access the root, the before-imperialism of culture and ways of relating to each other, some reconnection with a world of folk-memory is required… That’s my reading anyway… And the access to deep memory & the richness that grows from links with the spirit world are mediated for us by someone who has limited control over this painful, overloaded experience – Azaro.
Yet we know Azaro DOES interpret. Because he lies. When Azaro lies, the right to interpret, to make sense, the power of the subject, is returned to us as to him. It’s a gift! And parcelled with it, the many images and stories of roads and the road offer endless food for contemplation, and I feel I will return to them and reinterpret them in many contexts.
Then came the episode of the poisoned milk, distributed by a political party canvassing for votes
Suddenly the sense of community coalesces. The symbolism speaks. The deceitfulness and peril of whiteness is exposed. It recurs in many guises: from false holiness to naked danger to amulet of enemies.
But Okri would not have us simplify, would not have us make this many-faceted reflection into a parable where every sign has one meaning
And that, I think, is the reason for the profusion of his prose, the reason for the foregoing frustration: it is intended to break the habit of convergent thinkers like me (schooled by an education that punishes failure to alight immediately on correctness, an education that denies the subjectivity of the subject even as it subjects her, an education that sneers at feeling) of seeking the single reading, the one thread of meaning.
The texture of this book is excessive. It is the sensory excess of an overloaded perception, recorded almost without interpretation by its narrator or his interlocutors. That texture can overwhelm. I did not enjoy this book. But the texture is essential; the texture of excess is the device used to create the ambiance of an unfamiliar, unheimlich, heightened experience and to disrupt the reductive will to interpretation. It actively subverts thinking through colonialism
There is no romance about community here. The world we look into is a world of violence, patriarchy, self-interest. But the community is already impacted and fragmented by the workings of imperialism; as is signalled by the tearing-out of the community in the opening scenes. This would be mere accident if it weren’t for the violence heaped upon violence by brutal state and avaricious capitalist. These sources of violence are thus positioned and remain in place throughout the narrative. To access the root, the before-imperialism of culture and ways of relating to each other, some reconnection with a world of folk-memory is required… That’s my reading anyway… And the access to deep memory & the richness that grows from links with the spirit world are mediated for us by someone who has limited control over this painful, overloaded experience – Azaro.
Yet we know Azaro DOES interpret. Because he lies. When Azaro lies, the right to interpret, to make sense, the power of the subject, is returned to us as to him. It’s a gift! And parcelled with it, the many images and stories of roads and the road offer endless food for contemplation, and I feel I will return to them and reinterpret them in many contexts.
August 24, 2020
Definitely not my cup of tea.
May 19, 2021
Rüyalar, hayaller, periler ve doğa üstü diğer pek çok unsurla bir büyülü ortam yaratıyor yazar. Ama normalde bu unsurlar kullanılarak yaratılan dünyalardan çok farklı, korkunç ve kötü bir dünya bu. Kabus görür gibi ilerliyor kitap. Kabus karabasana dönüşüyor, gerginlik ve ürperti hiç bitmiyor. Üstelik bu korkunç büyülü ortam öyle şeyler anlatmak için kullanılıyor ki.. Kentsel dönüşüm ve toprak rantı, çevre felaketleri, yoksulluk, işsizlik, yabancılaşma, kadın sorunu ve hatta “sınıf temelinden koparılmış kadın sorunu” sorunu.. İnanamadım okurken, yazarın tüm bunları, hem de bu yöntemle anlatıp çiğleşmemesine.
Çok, çok beğendim fakat tavsiye etmesi çok zor bir kitap. O yaratılan kabusun içine girmeyi başaramazsan hiç akmaz, çok da bunaltır. Ama bir kere nüfuz edince de, hem anlatımın gücüne hayran oluyor insan, hem de Nijerya’nın varoşlarında yaşananların burnumuzun dibinde yaşananlarla tıpatıp aynı olmasını bir kez daha idrak ediyor.
Keşke üçlemenin diğer iki kitabı da çevrilse..
Çok, çok beğendim fakat tavsiye etmesi çok zor bir kitap. O yaratılan kabusun içine girmeyi başaramazsan hiç akmaz, çok da bunaltır. Ama bir kere nüfuz edince de, hem anlatımın gücüne hayran oluyor insan, hem de Nijerya’nın varoşlarında yaşananların burnumuzun dibinde yaşananlarla tıpatıp aynı olmasını bir kez daha idrak ediyor.
Keşke üçlemenin diğer iki kitabı da çevrilse..
April 9, 2017
I read this book when Ben Okri won the Booker Prize, its an astonishing read full of detail and insight into the world of spirits in village life. I could not put it down its compelling and hypnotic. Amust read for every serious book reader.
January 2, 2009
A very strange book. I found the first two thirds dull, densely dreamlike, and impenetrable. Then something caught fire, and the last third was absolutely riveting. In the final chapters, the camera pulls back and you realize that the book isn't just about a boy who is struggling to be "born"; it's about all of post-colonial Africa, struggling repeatedly to be born, and too often falling back into death. It needs to be read with Zimbabwe, or Liberia, or Sierra Leone, or Angola, or Uganda, or the Congo in mind.
If you can make it through the first part of the book, the last third is more than worth it. If you can't, don't say I didn't warn you.
If you can make it through the first part of the book, the last third is more than worth it. If you can't, don't say I didn't warn you.
August 12, 2021
موقعی که میخواستم این کتاب رو بخرم فقط دو دوست رو پیدا کردم که کتاب رو خوانده بودن و بهم نظرشون رو گفتن.
از سری کتابهای فوقالعادهای که بسیار بسیار نادیده گرفته شده.
در مورد داستان کتاب چیزی نمیگم فقط اینکه انقدر همه چیز دقیق و بی نظیر بیان شده بود که اون دنیا رو منم با چشمای آزارو تماشا کردم، حس کردم و لذت بردم.
از سری کتابهای فوقالعادهای که بسیار بسیار نادیده گرفته شده.
در مورد داستان کتاب چیزی نمیگم فقط اینکه انقدر همه چیز دقیق و بی نظیر بیان شده بود که اون دنیا رو منم با چشمای آزارو تماشا کردم، حس کردم و لذت بردم.
April 13, 2021
This book made me feel stupid for some reason. Its so confusing that I began to wonder if indeed I had any braincells left😀
There's a whole complex metaphor surrounding it that I couldn't separate facts from folly. It was all too bizarre.
Did this win awards? YES
Did I like it? No
Will I still ask my dad for book recommendations? YES
Will I tell him I didn't like this? That won't be necessary😀
February 19, 2022
I have tried. Over the years I have read a variety of novels that incorporate magic realism and have not enjoyed most of them. Every so often I try again, but the result here was the same. The Famished Road is magic realism from beginning to end, with reality mixed with dreams and often you can’t tell the two apart. I should not say I never enjoy magic realism. Beloved by Toni Morrison uses magic realism; I enjoyed that novel, and there are other examples. But it has been my experience with novels that use heavy doses of magic realism that the characters are often not well-developed, or I never develop strong feelings about the characters. Likewise, I usually find the plot lacking as well. Both observations were true with The Famished Road. I never felt anything for the characters, and I never felt engaged in the story. I am okay with finding myself confused or lost while reading a novel. I enjoy searching for some thread I can grab onto, so that was not the problem here. In my attempts with magic realism, I have wondered if it would be a style that would grow on me over time and with more exposure. That is still possible but has not proven to be the case so far.
When I go to an art museum, I expect to really like some of what I see and not feel much for other pieces or artists. I don’t consider the works to which I am not attracted to be lacking in value. They simply don’t have value that I recognize or can appreciate. That is how I feel about many novels that use magic realism. I do admire Ben Okri’s creativity, and for those that really enjoy magic realism this might be just the thing for you. This novel won the Booker in 1991. While not all the Booker award winners that I have read have worked for me, reading the Booker award winners has introduced me to many authors that I am not sure I would have come across otherwise and has helped me to find novels I loved and for which I still cherish the reading experience. Just not in this case.
When I go to an art museum, I expect to really like some of what I see and not feel much for other pieces or artists. I don’t consider the works to which I am not attracted to be lacking in value. They simply don’t have value that I recognize or can appreciate. That is how I feel about many novels that use magic realism. I do admire Ben Okri’s creativity, and for those that really enjoy magic realism this might be just the thing for you. This novel won the Booker in 1991. While not all the Booker award winners that I have read have worked for me, reading the Booker award winners has introduced me to many authors that I am not sure I would have come across otherwise and has helped me to find novels I loved and for which I still cherish the reading experience. Just not in this case.
January 9, 2022
The Famished Road is one of my favourite books of postmodern literature. I consider it one of the best books of a contemporary writer. The story is a first person adventure into a spirit wanderer named Azaro. The novel jumps back and forth between the spiritual realm and the physical realities of our earth as Azaro tries to make sense of life in late 20th century Nigeria. One thing which struck me about the book was Azaro and Madame Koto's friendship. As a character Madame Koto is simply radiant. Whether she is farting or jabbering, you feel that she is both larger than life and yet exactly like an auntie you know. I also appreciate the themes of interspirituality of the book, which I related to on a karmic level.
Thank you Ben Okri for writing this. Not everyone will understand your work, but I hope that you will be remembered for all time thanks to your contributions to global literature.
Thank you Ben Okri for writing this. Not everyone will understand your work, but I hope that you will be remembered for all time thanks to your contributions to global literature.
January 22, 2020
This was a 500 pages ride through a dream where the real world and the spirit world are interwoven at each step. To really appreciate this book the reader must be willing to let go of some rationale. I am one of those readers and I let myself be mesmerized.
There isn't much of a plot in the way of a typical fantastical story. It is a view into the harsh, devastating world of an unspecified African community through the eyes of an abiku, a spirit child. The time changes, yet for the ones who struggle with the unforgiving living conditions everything stays the same. Each spark of hope is followed by another defeat.
And still Ben Okri manages to put it in poetic words. His prose is wonderful, bittersweet, painfully honest. He succeeded to describe incidents that are detestable in a way that I never was put off by them.
I treasure this walk through a dream of broken hopes.
There isn't much of a plot in the way of a typical fantastical story. It is a view into the harsh, devastating world of an unspecified African community through the eyes of an abiku, a spirit child. The time changes, yet for the ones who struggle with the unforgiving living conditions everything stays the same. Each spark of hope is followed by another defeat.
And still Ben Okri manages to put it in poetic words. His prose is wonderful, bittersweet, painfully honest. He succeeded to describe incidents that are detestable in a way that I never was put off by them.
I treasure this walk through a dream of broken hopes.
November 6, 2025
if you like this review, i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com
240315: later addition: well the guardian newspaper says it is the 25th anniversary since publication- so what are you waiting for? read it!
review for third volume of 'the famished road' trilogy: this last of three novels by ben okri, the famished road series, is a great summation of themes introduced, elaborated, extended, from the other two. i read some reviewers who claim he merely includes more of the same, more fantastical, definitely african, images, thickening the stew but not creating new savour, but i suggest this is how to continue exploring this confusing world of a spirit child who would rather be free of human being, be free, be untouched by sorrows of living. there are too many images for me to describe them all, to suggest symbols, allegories, politics, ideology...
this is like the previous two volumes, built of short, poetic, vibrant scenes, and this is possibly one reason I liked it- spectacle- but there is an offered freedom when we do not identify with, but experience through, the central character, and this is one way into a the worlds described, the shifting realities, from the perspective of a child. who accepts everything, who does not separate dream from waking, or handicapped with modern sensibilities but instead in the openness of a child...
finally this is 'metaphysical' poetry- except the world of thought is not European, not English, not some centuries past but now, in Nigeria. i have often claimed i did not like poetry, going back to class at u, but to look at some works read this is obviously mistaken. in looking back, did really enjoy the beats, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, but there are many names do not recall- except I did not like Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, big historical names, known masterworks, though on the other, did enjoy Canterbury tales... need to read this again as it has been so long, this dislike. but i like this poetry, much as i like poetry-inflected prose such as amos tutuola, much as translation fascinates me with sense of literal versus thematically correct prose, such as the japanese work read. i am not bothered it does not resolve in a structure some of us- as 'western readers'- can understand, appreciate, delineate, for to me this is part of the magical aspect of azaro's world. the syncretic nigerian culture can best be felt, be seen, be heard, through the unending, furious, torrent of actions and characters, from madame koto the bar owner who becomes something more, to the dead carpenter no one will bury, to the blind old man, the beggar girl, to all the inhabitants of the bush and all the other worlds interwoven with this mundane reality...
this is told all in images, in obviously expressed emotional territory- madness, sadness, fury, fighting, running away- that it may seem to the characters have no 'internal' life, do not progress or change through these encounters, there is no logic, but to me this is simply because everything is open, vibrant, even should you need to enter the right spirit world, perform the right rituals, and be open to all the realities beyond what seems so real on a mundane level. and then there is some wisdom that comes apparent only in these magical states of reception, such as the politicians of the party of the rich, the politicians of the party of the poor, both magical, terrifying, promising only to eventually betray, such as the mythic fights his father gets in, establishes his fame, then how this is no help in realms of politics...
i never enjoyed art history as a class at u. now, i do not know how to stop seeing this world through that educated lens- now, as with my visual artist friends, i find art history everywhere, and i love it. perhaps this is how i feel about poetry, just because i did not like whatever it was we studied in such and such class. for this book is poetic narrative, this book is built of prose poetry, poetry given narrative descriptions, so easy to read, so defined by empty space as much as dialog, that i enjoyed this greatly...
there is of course some political content, chapter seven of book three, where we have the english governor general deliberately rewriting, deliberately destroying histories, to give you the idea nigeria's world did not begin until they arrived. well yes if you insist, there were people here before us europeans- but they were ahistorical, they were africans... but this and the other recounts of the g-g are really only giving this awareness to those of us not aware by now that this book, this series, is dedicated to righting wrongs of history by writing a nigerian world that precedes, and i suggest this is not 'merely' political, therefore should be in political histories and not novels, i believe this is metaphysical and essential and something we come to understand through all the varied, fantastic, comic and fearful, tale of this 'famished road'...
240315: later addition: well the guardian newspaper says it is the 25th anniversary since publication- so what are you waiting for? read it!
review for third volume of 'the famished road' trilogy: this last of three novels by ben okri, the famished road series, is a great summation of themes introduced, elaborated, extended, from the other two. i read some reviewers who claim he merely includes more of the same, more fantastical, definitely african, images, thickening the stew but not creating new savour, but i suggest this is how to continue exploring this confusing world of a spirit child who would rather be free of human being, be free, be untouched by sorrows of living. there are too many images for me to describe them all, to suggest symbols, allegories, politics, ideology...
this is like the previous two volumes, built of short, poetic, vibrant scenes, and this is possibly one reason I liked it- spectacle- but there is an offered freedom when we do not identify with, but experience through, the central character, and this is one way into a the worlds described, the shifting realities, from the perspective of a child. who accepts everything, who does not separate dream from waking, or handicapped with modern sensibilities but instead in the openness of a child...
finally this is 'metaphysical' poetry- except the world of thought is not European, not English, not some centuries past but now, in Nigeria. i have often claimed i did not like poetry, going back to class at u, but to look at some works read this is obviously mistaken. in looking back, did really enjoy the beats, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, but there are many names do not recall- except I did not like Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, big historical names, known masterworks, though on the other, did enjoy Canterbury tales... need to read this again as it has been so long, this dislike. but i like this poetry, much as i like poetry-inflected prose such as amos tutuola, much as translation fascinates me with sense of literal versus thematically correct prose, such as the japanese work read. i am not bothered it does not resolve in a structure some of us- as 'western readers'- can understand, appreciate, delineate, for to me this is part of the magical aspect of azaro's world. the syncretic nigerian culture can best be felt, be seen, be heard, through the unending, furious, torrent of actions and characters, from madame koto the bar owner who becomes something more, to the dead carpenter no one will bury, to the blind old man, the beggar girl, to all the inhabitants of the bush and all the other worlds interwoven with this mundane reality...
this is told all in images, in obviously expressed emotional territory- madness, sadness, fury, fighting, running away- that it may seem to the characters have no 'internal' life, do not progress or change through these encounters, there is no logic, but to me this is simply because everything is open, vibrant, even should you need to enter the right spirit world, perform the right rituals, and be open to all the realities beyond what seems so real on a mundane level. and then there is some wisdom that comes apparent only in these magical states of reception, such as the politicians of the party of the rich, the politicians of the party of the poor, both magical, terrifying, promising only to eventually betray, such as the mythic fights his father gets in, establishes his fame, then how this is no help in realms of politics...
i never enjoyed art history as a class at u. now, i do not know how to stop seeing this world through that educated lens- now, as with my visual artist friends, i find art history everywhere, and i love it. perhaps this is how i feel about poetry, just because i did not like whatever it was we studied in such and such class. for this book is poetic narrative, this book is built of prose poetry, poetry given narrative descriptions, so easy to read, so defined by empty space as much as dialog, that i enjoyed this greatly...
there is of course some political content, chapter seven of book three, where we have the english governor general deliberately rewriting, deliberately destroying histories, to give you the idea nigeria's world did not begin until they arrived. well yes if you insist, there were people here before us europeans- but they were ahistorical, they were africans... but this and the other recounts of the g-g are really only giving this awareness to those of us not aware by now that this book, this series, is dedicated to righting wrongs of history by writing a nigerian world that precedes, and i suggest this is not 'merely' political, therefore should be in political histories and not novels, i believe this is metaphysical and essential and something we come to understand through all the varied, fantastic, comic and fearful, tale of this 'famished road'...
March 24, 2008
I CAN'T HANDLE THIS BOOK! It's addicting and annoying and takes itself too seriously and colorful and tense and weird and jumpy and cool. WHAT DO I DO?! I am a bit over halfway and can't quite stop reading it but it keeps me up all night (not turning pages, but anxious after I put it down...). It's also ridonculously long, so I can't just suck it up and finish it in a couple nights...
ok i think i have offically given up on it. It had so much potential to be good but all of the acid trip writing never amounted to any real substance in the first 2/3 of the book! I give up! Not enough progress has been made for me to get some positive reinforcement in reading this. Too damn stressful...
blah
i've decided to finish it...
finished it.. happy I did.. but my previous comments still stick... there is no reward at the end.. the entire book is a big, bold, confusing, spiritual, poetry in prose abstract painting told in a dream-perspective (confusing, right?). The reward is the painting as a whole... no identifiable resolution whatsoever.
ok i think i have offically given up on it. It had so much potential to be good but all of the acid trip writing never amounted to any real substance in the first 2/3 of the book! I give up! Not enough progress has been made for me to get some positive reinforcement in reading this. Too damn stressful...
blah
i've decided to finish it...
finished it.. happy I did.. but my previous comments still stick... there is no reward at the end.. the entire book is a big, bold, confusing, spiritual, poetry in prose abstract painting told in a dream-perspective (confusing, right?). The reward is the painting as a whole... no identifiable resolution whatsoever.
November 19, 2012
This is my book of the year! I absolutely devoured this book. An African tale filled with folklore, sangomas and creatures of a nether world. The story traces the life of Lazarus, a boy gifted with the power to see and engage in the African spirit world. He takes you along a very hungry road that is Nigeria filled with poverty, corruption and disease yet also rich in many other ways. This book was filled with moments where I wonder what on earth was going on only to be dumped firmly back on harsh African soil. I had nightmares all the time while reading it, surreal magical creatures jumped from the book right into my dreams. I loved this book if I have one criticism it is that it probably could have been shorter - but that said - I wished it would never end. Read it!
December 30, 2019
How will you create a 'Midnight's Children' for a nation where there is political stability and which continues to born and reborn again (unlike Saleem Shinai who at least was born along with the nation)? You create spirit child - a creature born as human though it didnt want to or expected to. And thus it struggles with the connection it still has with the unliving. So far, so good.
The problem is that the book itself struggles with birth and rebirth. It seems like a bird who repeatedly takes flight only to come back to ground a few steps ahead. People often talk about feeling when book is about to end or has just ended; but there are two other stages. There is a sort of curiosity one feels when begining of the book, the uncertainty whether it is your thing or not; the eagerness to find footing in it. It is a good feeling but it must soon give into that other feeling you get when you know you are well set in your conversation with the book. This book won't let you settle (and unlike 'If on a winter's night a traveler', here it wasn't an enjoyable experience.
And Marvelous realism - whether it is magical or mythical, is normally my kink. But in here, it is like you do foreplay repeatedly without it ever going to more inteesting things, leave alone orgasm.
The problem is that the book itself struggles with birth and rebirth. It seems like a bird who repeatedly takes flight only to come back to ground a few steps ahead. People often talk about feeling when book is about to end or has just ended; but there are two other stages. There is a sort of curiosity one feels when begining of the book, the uncertainty whether it is your thing or not; the eagerness to find footing in it. It is a good feeling but it must soon give into that other feeling you get when you know you are well set in your conversation with the book. This book won't let you settle (and unlike 'If on a winter's night a traveler', here it wasn't an enjoyable experience.
And Marvelous realism - whether it is magical or mythical, is normally my kink. But in here, it is like you do foreplay repeatedly without it ever going to more inteesting things, leave alone orgasm.
June 18, 2025
The Famished Road follows protagonist Azaro, a child who exists simultaneously in the realm of the living and the spirit world. He lives in crushing poverty with his Mum and Dad in an unnamed African country (presumably Nigeria) in a time just prior to independence (1950s-1960s). Azaro is abiku, a spirit who repeatedly dies and is reborn to the same mother, perpetually existing as a young child in a state of transition. A local bar owner plays a key in the story. Competing political parties are rife with corruption, violence, and exploitation.
Okri employs the spirit world to present the rich African (especially Nigerian-Yoruban) culture and traditions, and the physical world to represent colonialism and independence, with their attendant disruptions. It reads as a dreamlike narrative infused with magical realism and plenty of symbolism. It is beautifully written but requires perseverance and I occasionally noticed my attention wandering. Toward the end I was ready to be finished. This is the first book in The Famished Road trilogy. I will probably continue with the sequels at some point but not anytime soon.
“The road will never swallow you. The river of your destiny will always overcome evil. May you understand your fate. Suffering will never destroy you, but will make you stronger. Success will never confuse you or scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.”
3.5
Okri employs the spirit world to present the rich African (especially Nigerian-Yoruban) culture and traditions, and the physical world to represent colonialism and independence, with their attendant disruptions. It reads as a dreamlike narrative infused with magical realism and plenty of symbolism. It is beautifully written but requires perseverance and I occasionally noticed my attention wandering. Toward the end I was ready to be finished. This is the first book in The Famished Road trilogy. I will probably continue with the sequels at some point but not anytime soon.
“The road will never swallow you. The river of your destiny will always overcome evil. May you understand your fate. Suffering will never destroy you, but will make you stronger. Success will never confuse you or scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.”
3.5
September 18, 2018
بزودی با فروکش کردن تب و تاب حاصل از خواندن این کتاب عجیب و روياگونه، یادداشت مختصری ارائه می گردد.
November 28, 2011
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.
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.
August 9, 2012
An awful book. Boring, impenetrable, and practically unreadable. Utter dross hiding behind the obscure and silly moniker of 'magic realism'. I have to admit I started skimming whole paragraphs, something I've NEVER done as a reader.
Nonesense. Vague. Over written. No plot. Rubbish.
Nonesense. Vague. Over written. No plot. Rubbish.
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