{"product_id":"the-famished-road-isbn-9780385425131","title":"The Famished Road","description":"\u003cb\u003eBOOKER PRIZE WINNER • A modern classic that reveals the tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits. •  \"A dazzling achievement for any writer in any language.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the decade since it won the Booker Prize, Ben Okri's \u003ci\u003eFamished Road\u003c\/i\u003e has become a classic. Like Salman Rushdie's \u003ci\u003eMidnight's Children\u003c\/i\u003e or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's \u003ci\u003eOne Hundred Years of Solitude,\u003c\/i\u003e it combines brilliant narrative technique with a fresh vision to create an essential work of world literature.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe narrator, Azaro, is an \u003ci\u003eabiku,\u003c\/i\u003e a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. The life he foresees for himself and the tale he tells is full of sadness and tragedy, but inexplicably he is born with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute.\"A dazzling achievement for any writer in any language.\" \u003ci\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"A mesmerizing vision of modern Nigeria, seen through the eyes of a peculiarly sentient child…. The Famished Road is a quintessential African novel.” \u003ci\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Philadelphia Inquirer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“A stunning work, suspenseful and haunting, the product of one of the lushest imaginations on record.” \u003ci\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Plain Dealer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\"A masterpiece if one ever existed.\" \u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Boston Globe\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Dazzling, hypnotic ... a true feast for the word hungry.\" \u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003e—San Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eBEN OKRI's books have won  several awards including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa, the  Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the prestigious  International Literary Prize Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore 1993. \u003ci\u003eThe  Famished Road\u003c\/i\u003e won the Booker Prize in 1991. He was born in Minna,  Nigeria.from the INTRODUCTION by Vanessa Guignery\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e ‘I felt on the edge of reality.’ These are the words uttered by the narrator of \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003eas 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\u003cbr\u003e enchanting and terrifying worlds.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In 1991, the publication of \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003emarked 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, \u003ci\u003eFlowers and Shadows\u003c\/i\u003e, in the Longman ‘Drumbeat’ series, a showcase for recent African writing. This was followed by \u003ci\u003eThe Landscapes Within \u003c\/i\u003ein 1981 and two collections of short stories (\u003ci\u003eIncidents at the Shrine \u003c\/i\u003ein 1986 and \u003ci\u003eStars of the New Curfew \u003c\/i\u003ein 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003ewhich 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road\u003c\/i\u003e, 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, \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003eprivileges 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’.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Just as Okri is ‘a crossroads person, a child of intersection’ between Africa and Europe, \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003eis 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 \u003ci\u003eOdyssey\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road\u003c\/i\u003e. 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.’ \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003ealso 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 (\u003ci\u003eForest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter’s Saga\u003c\/i\u003e, 1938) and Amos Tutuola in English (\u003ci\u003eThe Palm-Wine Drinkard\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003eemerged 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.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003ewas 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 \u003ci\u003eDangerous Love\u003c\/i\u003e, which he described as ‘a kind of twin’ to \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003ein its ‘search for an artistic language with which to express the true nature of reality’). After completing these books, Okri explained that he ‘got tired of the traditional artifices and realism of the novel’ and that ‘the naturalism of Tolstoy, Dickens and Balzac did not speak to the world [he] grew up in’. He started questioning what constitutes the essence of reality and developed a mode of writing that he described in various interviews as ‘trans-realism’, ‘a deeper kind of realism’ or ‘a realism with many more dimensions’. In doing so, he was veering away not only from Western naturalism but also from the African literary trend of Chinua Achebe or Ngu˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o (in Kenya), which had appropriated the form of the Western novel and used the mould of cultural nationalism to depict the indigenous African past. But neither did Okri strictly follow the model of Amos Tutuola’s folkloric dream-narratives in which the supernatural prevails and is most of the time clearly differentiated from the real world. In \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road\u003c\/i\u003e, Okri opens a third way by weaving together the realistic and the esoteric, while never letting the mythopoeic and fantastic dimensions occupy the whole space (as would tend to be the case in his 1995 novel \u003ci\u003eAstonishing the Gods\u003c\/i\u003e, written ‘in a mode of enchantment’ while fasting). He is thus, as he said in an interview, ‘inside and outside of realism’: by incorporating mythical, animist and magical beliefs and manifestations within the real world, he is abiding by the African (especially Urhobo and Yoruba) belief that the spirits and the dead are an integral part of the world of the living.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In his foreword to Cervantes’s \u003ci\u003eThe Dialogue of the Dogs \u003c\/i\u003e(1613), Okri notes that the Spanish writer ‘loves to mirror the world through odd angles and tangents’, here by the means of two dogs talking about the follies, treacheries and mean-mindedness of humanity. \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003elikewise propounds an original perspective on the human condition, thanks to a child who is able to see ‘the world of our reality and the world of spiritual reality simultaneously’, one who is aware of anterior and future lives, and has access to other characters’ dreams and thoughts. Okri explained that his wish and ‘arduous brief ’ when writing \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003ewas to give ‘voice to the living myth of the spirit child’. The main character, Azaro, is such a spirit child, a magical figure invented by Okri, which is a transformed incarnation of the \u003ci\u003eabiku \u003c\/i\u003ein Yoruba or the \u003ci\u003eogbanje \u003c\/i\u003ein Igbo, a well-known figure in West African mythology who follows an endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth to the same mother, a helpless victim to this constant coming and going. The traditional figure of the \u003ci\u003eabiku \u003c\/i\u003eappears in many works of Nigerian literature, such as Amos Tutuola’s \u003ci\u003eMy Life in the Bush of Ghosts \u003c\/i\u003e(1954), John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo’s poem ‘Abiku’ (1965), Wole Soyinka’s poem similarly entitled ‘Abiku’ (1967), and Okri’s poem ‘Political Abiku’ (1983), which starts with the following lines: ‘He returned again \/ And again \/ Through her parturition \/ With executions on his fingers \/ With numberless deaths \/ As his rings of pearls’. In such texts, \u003ci\u003eabikus \u003c\/i\u003eare portrayed as mischievous, defiant and malevolent, indifferent to the suffering they cause their parents when returning to the world of the dead. When they are about to be born, these ambiguous beings make a pact to return to the spirit world at the first opportunity because, as noted in \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road\u003c\/i\u003e, they dislike ‘the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world’ and prefer to feast and play in their enchanting universe.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In Okri’s novel, however, the spirit child is, in the author’s words, ‘another category altogether’, a figure that is magical, hopeful, ‘has the quality of liberty’ and ‘wills himself to live, against the power of death itself ’. Indeed, the benevolent narrator-character decides to put an end to his mother’s misery and to remain in the palpable world of the living even while retaining contact with his spirit companions who visit him and regularly attempt to lure him back to their world. The book therefore hovers between these different realities which meet and coexist, and Azaro, a wanderer who is born with ‘an inextinguishable sense of exile’, occupies an in-between position which enables him to make forays into the realm of the spirits while still living in the compound, thereby straddling the two worlds simultaneously. To the spirit child, this new environment is a quotidian journey of discovery, which will never let him take reality for granted, hence his constant bafflement and openmouthed wonder that lead him to marvel even at cobwebs and cockroaches. The mundane life Azaro chooses to adhere to is a challenging one: the novel presents in a poetic mode the harrowing condition of the ghetto dwellers who are exploited and persecuted by their landlords, employers and politicians, and vividly depicts the struggles of everyday life in the compound, at the marketplace or at the garage where people fight for survival in a general atmosphere of violence, tension and hunger. From his unique perspective, the spirit child is able to observe the evils of history, witness his father’s shame, humiliation and defiance, and drink in ‘the food of suffering’ but he can also perceive the raw beauty of his mother’s love, hear ‘the walls talking, the chair complaining, the floor pacing, the insects gossiping’, and hug ‘the alarming mystery of reality’. Just as Caliban in \u003ci\u003eThe Tempest\u003c\/i\u003e remarks that ‘The isle is full of noises, \/ Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not’, Azaro in \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003eis sensitive enough to hear the multifarious noises and voices coming from both the worldly and spiritual realms, from past, present and future. When a character asks the young boy how many ears he has, Azaro answers ‘One’ and adds: ‘I hear things. Voices. Words. Trees. Flowers.’ It is this dual and open consciousness which makes Azaro such a precious guide into the worlds of \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003eor what Okri calls the ‘innumerable gradations of reality’.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The constant movement between different realities in the novel entails a fluidity of time and space, which recalls the enigmatic atmosphere of dreams. \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003eis set on the verge of a mysterious independence (‘Independence is coming’, one of the characters announces) and includes a few brief mentions of white men, colonial uniforms and the seizing of land, but no specific date or context for the action is given and the narrative eschews linearity, evolving instead in spirals, arabesques and cycles. The book espouses the free movements of myth and creativity, the ebb and flow of the imagination, rather than adhering to the teleological orientation of history. Although it opens with a sentence rich in biblical and mythical overtones (‘In the beginning there was a river’), the novel challenges the notions of beginnings and endings, and borrows a sense of cyclicality and inconclusiveness from West African folklore tales. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003eshould not reach a definite closure on the last page but leave the door (and road) open for two later novels featuring the same characters, \u003ci\u003eSongs of\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eEnchantment \u003c\/i\u003e(1993) and \u003ci\u003eInfinite Riches \u003c\/i\u003e(1998). To Okri, the idea of a book being finished sounds strange because books are restless and ‘continue to clamour’, ‘continue to ask questions’. In the trilogy, the young protagonist Azaro does not develop in a linear way as in a traditional \u003ci\u003eBildungsroman \u003c\/i\u003ebut his adventures follow a pattern that is at once episodic and repetitive, balladic and cyclical, reminding one of the modes of narration favoured by the griot or African storyteller, as well as the structures of the picaresque and the epic. \u003ci\u003eThe Famished Road \u003c\/i\u003ealso shows that time can be perceived very differently by two individuals, one asserting that five hundred years have elapsed since they last met when another believes it has only been two weeks. ‘Time is not what you think it is’, one character states, thereby encouraging the reader to discard the conventional perception of time based on a rational division into countable units, and to embrace a more subjective, poetic and psychological approach to time and duration. Okri returns to the enigma of time in the introduction to \u003ci\u003eThe Magic Lamp \u003c\/i\u003e(2017), a volume which pairs twenty-five stories by Okri and twenty-five paintings by Rosemary Clunie, when he writes: ‘Time is a riddle which the writer and artist interpret in their dreams.’ . . .Winner of the Booker Prize","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304179716325,"sku":"NP9780385425131","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780385425131.jpg?v=1767739290","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-famished-road-isbn-9780385425131","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}