The Palm-Wine Drinkard & My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in The Roundtable

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May 01, 2013 Zadignose added it

Shelves: 20th-century, stuff-to-share

After a lifetime spent reading crazy books, I've found that this is the craziest book of all. It's a staggering and amazing book, and one that I think many will have difficulty in approaching "critically," but as an experience it's awesome.

I read Palm-Wine Drinkard first, then read other things, and came back a month later to read My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. I was impressed by Palm-Wine Drinkard. While Bush of Ghosts reads very much like a continuation of Palm-Wine Drinkard, I'd say it's even After a lifetime spent reading crazy books, I've found that this is the craziest book of all. It's a staggering and amazing book, and one that I think many will have difficulty in approaching "critically," but as an experience it's awesome.

I read Palm-Wine Drinkard first, then read other things, and came back a month later to read My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. I was impressed by Palm-Wine Drinkard. While Bush of Ghosts reads very much like a continuation of Palm-Wine Drinkard, I'd say it's even better as a book, and even more bizarre.

Tempting comparisons would include Alice in Wonderland, Dante's Inferno, The Popol Vuh, and Mabinogion. It has elements of trippy and entertaining fantasy/nightmare adventure, spiritual descent into the terrors of the supernatural and afterlife, exotic cultural literature with strong pagan influence, and raw anarchic folk literature.

But it is what it is, and it's none of the above, except for incidental similarities. It may not have received any direct influence from any such literature.

Language in the book is as amazing and bizarre as the tale which is narrated. There is no way for me to know how much this resembles genuine Nigerian Pidgin/Dialect, how much it was an expression of the author's own language innovation, and how much it may or may not have been "put on" by the writer. It doesn't matter because it's fascinating and entertaining as language.

Some readers may struggle with the work because they expect it to be comprehensible as allegory or symbolic expression, yet I believe that its character is more like that of folk literatures where the intent is either obscure or secondary to the experience aspect, the immersion into an other-worldly experience.

If you read the book, you must laugh. If you don't laugh, you're not in tune with the book. You may at first be uncomfortable: Am I laughing at the author, or with him? By the end, I think you'll have no doubt. This author has a great knack for entertaining, even in his telling of macabre, nightmarish, and oneiric tales.

Choose any one of the many adventures and episodes within the text, and ask yourself "could this be omitted without damaging the text?" Surprisingly, the answer is "yes!" Is this episode gratuitous? Superfluous? "yes!" But would I choose to omit it? "no!" The episodes do not contribute to driving forward of a narrative, in a direct cause-effect chain, and they do not belong to a rigidly structured logical form, with a clear thesis which is doggedly pursued. No. They are mostly included for their value as entertainment. The text could be half the length and still be great... but it wouldn't be as great.

This is radical literature. ...more

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Nov 21, 2015 Lise Petrauskas marked it as to-read

Shelves: africa, 20th-century-fiction

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Nov 15, 2015 Jennifer marked it as to-read

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