The Famished Road: Introduction by Vanessa Guignery (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series) - Hardcover

Okri, Ben

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593320255 ISBN 13: 9780593320259

Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

A beautiful hardcover Contemporary Classics edition of Nigerian author Ben Okri's lushly imaginative novel, which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1991.

The narrator of The Famished Road is a spirit-child who exists between life and death, destined to an endless cycle of death and rebirth. But this time, born with a smile on his face, Azaro begins to fall in love with life and to rebel against his fate. The story the child tells flows between the difficulties of the land of the living and the carefree world of spirits. Okri infuses a vivid portrait of an unnamed West African country with the rich traditions of African mythology and the result is a powerfully haunting masterpiece.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

BEN OKRI's books have won several awards including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the International Literary Prize Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore 1993. The Famished Road won the Booker Prize in 1991. He was born in Minna, Nigeria.

About the Introducer: VANESSA GUIGNERY is Professor of English Literature and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. She is the author of Novelists in the New Millennium.

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from the INTRODUCTION by Vanessa Guignery
 
‘I felt on the edge of reality.’ These are the words uttered by the narrator of The Famished Road as he recalls his venturing to a location that looked like ‘a strange fairyland in the real world’. The sentence perfectly encapsulates the ambivalent and fragile position of a child whose wanderings take him and the readers of Okri’s third novel to a multiplicity of places set in the real or the supernatural realm, or a mixture of both. A child of miracles, who knows no boundaries and observes what surrounds him with eyes wide open, Azaro is our very special guide into Okri’s
enchanting and terrifying worlds.
 
In 1991, the publication of The Famished Road marked the emergence of a unique literary voice, that of a writer who was born in 1959 in Minna, a railway town in central Nigeria, nineteen months before his country’s independence, lived in London between the ages of one-and-a-half and seven, reluctantly travelled back to Nigeria with his parents and siblings in 1966, and eventually decided to settle in Great Britain at the age of nineteen. While the violence of the Nigeria–Biafra war of 1967–70 greatly affected the young boy, life in Lagos sparked his imagination, teaching him that ‘there was no one world-view, but as many worlds as there are ways of seeing’. As a teenager, he closely observed his father practising law and taking up the cases of destitute people, which led him to develop a fascination for human beings and more particularly the voiceless and unheard victims of social inequalities. In 1978, he left Nigeria for London, which he considered the home of literature, and two years later published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows, in the Longman ‘Drumbeat’ series, a showcase for recent African writing. This was followed by The Landscapes Within in 1981 and two collections of short stories (Incidents at the Shrine in 1986 and Stars of the New Curfew in 1988), which prompted Chinua Achebe to name Okri as one of the new generation of African writers ‘who hold a promise of becoming really major’. The promise was fulfilled with The Famished Road which won the Booker Prize, making Okri, at the time, the youngest recipient and first black African writer to receive the award. Three decades after winning the prestigious prize, Okri, for whom writing is an Arcadia, declared that ‘the flame and the hunger and the dreams’ were still there.

The Famished Road, Okri noted, was the outcome of a decade of experimentation with form, tone and tincture, in order to find the elixir that would enable him to create the imaginary world he had in mind. This implied, on the part of the author, a Blakean cleansing of the doors of perception to see, hear, smell, taste and touch the world differently. The novel invites readers to do likewise, to open their senses and minds, to look at and for what is not directly visible, ‘not the things we s[ee], but the things in between, the myths in between, the tone in between’, to quote Okri. When a character announces: ‘We must look at the world with new eyes’, he is echoing what Okri wrote in several poems, short stories and essays, and this new insight pertains to both the visible and the invisible. The reader is therefore encouraged to let go of previous assumptions, entrenched reading habits and Western binary conceptions which separate the living and the dead, the real and the supernatural. Instead, The Famished Road privileges circulation, the free flow of ideas, sensations, stories and worlds without boundaries. This implies that, in accordance with West African modes of being and perceiving, the spirits and the dead are part of the everyday environment of the living, making it possible for them all to eat at the same table and for a character of the compound to fight with the ghost of a deceased boxer. Okri recalls that his own childhood was ‘populated with spirits, ghosts, deaths, war, hunger, magic, transformations, sorceries’, and his awareness of an animist conception of the world led him to have ‘a humble and magical relationship with reality’.
 
Just as Okri is ‘a crossroads person, a child of intersection’ between Africa and Europe, The Famished Road is a sea of stories deriving from West African mythology, European traditions and Eastern philosophies, which mix and intertwine with the author’s own creations. In addition to the enigmatic stories his mother used to tell him and left him puzzling over for years afterwards, and the philosophical books, Greek and Roman myths, and Western classics his father liked so much, Okri let his mind resonate with many realities while writing the novel: ‘the realities of Africa, but also the literary realities of writing in London, in full consciousness of a universal literary and artistic tradition, from Homer to Okigbo, from Monteverdi to Jazz, from cave paintings through Giotto and African art to Picasso and modernist and post-modernist trends’. Homer’s Odyssey, which the main character reads to his father in the evening and which Okri refers to as ‘an immortal tale of the cosmic difficulties of the return’, has close affinities with The Famished Road. Okri noted about the epic poem: ‘More than a book, it is a civilization, and yet it is an intimate story of a man, a family, an adventure’, words which find a particular resonance with his own novel. It is certainly not surprising that Okri, who is an adept of the blurring of frontiers between nations and traditions, should have said: ‘I feel Homer to be African.’ The Famished Road also carries with it echoes of the Urhobo myths and realities the writer was introduced to by his father, and of the West African oral traditions and the wealth of folktales which inspired the mythical and supernatural works of Nigerian writers D. O. Fagunwa in Yoruba (Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter’s Saga, 1938) and Amos Tutuola in English (The Palm-Wine Drinkard, 1952). Okri supplements these rich traditions with reminiscences of the original form of social realism that was developed by Chinua Achebe and of the encounter of the political and the mythical in the writings of Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka. When Okri praised Soyinka for his reconciliation of ‘the social with the mythic, the comic with the tragic’, he could have been referring to his own work. As for the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo, of whom Okri is a great admirer, his combination of indigenous traditions with Western modernism and antiquity in his poetry may bring to mind Okri’s own cultural and literary eclecticism. Although The Famished Road emerged from the reverberation of all these poems, tales, fables and myths in the writer’s mind, the novel creates its own unique worlds, stories, voices and styles. Okri remarked that the writer has to get rid of ‘the tendency to always anchor what is being done within a tradition’ as such classifi ation destroys any attempt at originality, and the duty of the artist is specifically to cut new paths, ‘travel the untravelled road’, open new vistas.
 
The Famished Road was born from a dissatisfaction with the limitations of realism and marks a departure from Okri’s earlier novels which focused on social and political issues in Lagos, and were written in the mode of social realism without any forays into the supernatural (in 1996, Okri would revise his second novel and ‘transfigure’ it into Dangerous Love, which he described as ‘a kind of twin’ to The Famished Road in its...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Everyman's Library
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593320255
• ISBN 13: 9780593320259
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 616
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar