Athena K's Review - The Famished Road

I too am playing catch up - I have been reading but I took a break from blogging for a month or two.  So I'll be adding things from my list over the nnxt week or so!

Reading The Famished Road was like experiencing a dream.  The characters, scenery, setting and action seemed constantly fluid entities, capable of changing shape and status at any given time.  While I found this reading experience to be new and profoundly different, and at first fantastic and engaging, Ben Okri was unable to maintain my interest in this dream for such a prolonged novel.

Partly because it was so dreamlike, I found myself frustrated by the fact that there was very little conventional "plot." Story lines sprung up from nowhere, and melted away almost as quickly.  Characters changed from good to evil depending on the mood of the narrator; events of major importance and symbolism are never carried through to their completion; and cycles are repeated with very little apparent consciousness or learning from past experience.  I looked  for the meaning behind apparently symbolic characters (e.g., the photographer, Madame Koto, the blind man, the beggar girl) but I could not fit the pieces together.

Reading this makes it sound like I really didn't enjoy the book.  In fact, for the first 2/3 I was very engaged and fascinated by the complex dream narration of Azaro, our child narrator.  Azaro's story is one of poverty, struggle, corruption and human sacrifice in a Nigerian town.  His themes include the constant battle between life and death, rich and poor, and good and evil. However, once it became apparent that despite reaching a climax of sorts, the novel was pressing on in its aimless meander through spirit world adventures, I lost interest. The only real problem for me was it was too long.

Laura's Review - The Famished Road

OK, listen carefully people. The next time I pick up a book written in the magical realism style, please stop me!

Magical realism just doesn't do anything for me. And The Famished Road is 500 pages of dreams, ghosts, cats that appear out of nowhere, and unusual people who behave in strange and mystical ways. It's the story of Azaro, a "spirit child," who remains in contact with the spirit world after his birth. Azaro's family is clearly struggling to earn a living, make ends meet, feed and clothe themselves, etc.

The book started off strong with this opening sentence:

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. (p. 3)

Well, that's just beautiful. And there are many passages like that. But, as I mentioned, there are also dreams, ghosts, cats that appear out of nowhere, and unusual people who behave in strange and mystical ways. This book is full of allegory and cultural references that I just couldn't grasp. Some reviews (notably Trevor's on The Complete Booker) cited the value of facilitated classroom discussion. That might have helped me overcome the whole magical realism thing. As it was, I read only the first 71 pages and decided there were better ways to spend my time.

My original review can be found here.

Katrina's review of The Famished Road (1991 Winner)

This book about the life a a spirit-child, he struggles and fights for his chance to live, and at many times has to fight against the spirits who want him to return to the spirit world.
The book deals with many African political and social problems, including poverty, hunger, lack of stability and the dirty tricks and means used by politicians to capture as man votes as they can. The whole community is filled with spirits and their actions can affect the life of all, yet the boy is the person most affected. He moves between normal life, the spirit world and a time and space where they both converge.
I'll be honest and say that this book was a struggle, I'm sure that their were many references to folk tales, religion and cultural beliefs that I just didn't know enough about to recognise. However, this is a book that I wish I had had the opportunity to study when I was at university, it would have been great to learn about the influences, origins and context of the novel and to attend seminars and hear other peoples views about it.
Challenges:
2008 Booker Challenge: Book 5/6
Fall into Reading: Book 1
Olympic Challenge: Nigeria
Book Awards 2: Book 1/10

Jackie's Review of 'The Famished Road'

'The Famished Road' is the moving story of African, the spirit child, who is constantly jumping between the two worlds. The spirit world is described so vividly that I was almost convinced it exists!

I know very little about African mythology, and so was worried that I would become lost in this book. There were probably lots of references that I did not pick up on, but at no point did I feel overwhelmed by the plot. In fact I found it very easy to read. Even though it was nearly 600 pages long, it felt like a much shorter book. That said, it is probably not a book to be dipped into casually over a period of time. I think that you need to devote a few large amounts of time, in a short period, in order to immerse yourself in the world.

The characters were well drawn, and I felt real empathy for their plight by the end. The plot was also very well planned, and the moral of the book became hard to ignore as the book came to a close. I loved the book and recommend it to anyone with a large amount of free time on their hands!

4 out of 5 stars

Trevor's Review of Okri's The Famished Road

"In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the roa branched out to the whole world. And because it was once a river it was always hungry."

How can a book that begins that way be anything less than important without fear that it took itself too seriously? I admit that when I started this book, I thought Okri might have pulled a fast one on literature, a bit too pretentious for his own good. But then I got to the next sentences, and I realized that this book was important and profound and demanded to be listened to.

I read Okri's The Famished Road for a post-colonial literary theory class a few years back. I am not sure how I would have felt about it if I weren't subject to three or four two-hour discussions on it. It is very complex. It is filled with everyday stories brought out to encompass gigantic themes, such as nation-building. It deals in liminal space and assumes the reader will put forth the effort to follow. At times it reads like a folk-tale and, as can be seen, at other times it reads like passages from the Bible.

This is from the back of the book: "The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death." There is a lot of going back and forth, and it can get confusing. The other characters are likewise complicated. Underneath it all is an important look at history's influence on the contemporary world.

But, as I said, I don't think I could have appreciated it without the help of a dedicated professor who dwealt in post-colonial literature. In fact, even after excellent lectures, I'd go home to read another portion and find myself thoroughly confused. Not confused, necessarily, by the plot. Confused as to what it all was getting at. Most of the time, however, my inability to understand it came from my desire to read through it at a certain pace. Its an important book, and it takes time to digest.

"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 born 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, civilisations, ideas, half-discoveries, revolutions, loves, art forms, experiments, and historical events that are of this condition and do not know it."

4 stars out of 5.