The Famished Road by Ben Okri

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I'm going to finish this book tonight, and I just wanted to get people's feelings/thoughts/opinions on it. I picked this book up when my senior seminar professor mentioned it, saying it was about a spirit-child who saw bizarre images (and, admittedly, some suck-up points).

Here's mine.

My basic opinion of this novel can be summed up with these words: It's a hundred pages too long. I liked the prose style and bizarre imagery Okri created, but it wore then after three hundred pages, and getting through the last hundred pages has been brutal. It just simply isn't holding my interest. While I enjoyed the overall bizarreness of the books most of the way through, lack of a discernible cohesive plot was just too much for me to handle.

Unfortunately, I think maybe a big reason I'm not getting into this book is because I don't get it, or, more specifically, I don't get what it represents, because I'm sure it represents a whole lot I just don't understand; i.e., the politics of Okri's homeland, Nigeria. My prof said he would have liked to have taught it, but thought it was too long. I wish he had, because I think I would have better understood it if I had some guidance.

I could go on, but I will wait and see if anyone else here has read it before I stay up later, writing more.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

No one on here has read it? It won the Booker prize . . .

[Hank Stamper]

I've read it and I certainly understand what you mean about the length - it's not the easiest book to get through, but that is clearly because it doesn't really have a plot in the traditional sense

I think it is meant to make us question reality - and that is what the dream-sequences do (what is real/what isn't, etc).. as for Azaro.. he could be seen as representing the birth of a new nation (Nigeria).. and the dreams can represent the idea that all nations/ideas start as dreams .. ultimately I think it is meant to make us see the world in a different way.. a really good book to read is Brenda Cooper's Magic Realism in West African Literature, as she explains this concept about 'seeing with a third-eye' much better than I can!

[neilgee]

Did read it when I was doing an African Lit module at uni, or just afterwards, and remember finding all those inane boxing/fighting fantasies very wearing, it just didn't seem to go anywhere. I was disappointed after reading so many brilliant African novels, couldn't get the feel of this one at all.