The Famished Road

At the heart of this hypnotic novel are the mysteries of love and human survival. "It is more difficult to love than to die," says Azaro's father, and indeed, it is love that brings real sharpness to suffering here. As the story moves toward its climax, Azaro must face the consequences of choosing to live, of choosing to walk the road of hunger rather than return to the benign land of spirits. The Famished Road is worth reading for its last line alone, which must be one of the most devastating endings in contemporary literature (but don't skip ahead). --R. Ellis

Product Description
In the decade since it won the Booker Prize, Ben Okri's Famished Road has become a classic. Like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, it combines brilliant narrative technique with a fresh vision to create an essential work of world literature.

The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, 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. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus's story.

I'm a scholar and I devote most of my academic time to the study of contemporary African fiction, with special care for novels written in English. Most readers have not understood the book properly, because they thought that this was pure fancy, or, worse, sheer delirium, talented though it might be.

What must be repeated over and over again is that Okri is indebted to such Yoruba authors like D.O. Fagunwa or the Anglophone pioneer Amos Tutuola. Concerning Azaro's status as an abiku (or spirit-child), many readers (and many critics in the press as well, which is really frightening!) thought that this was a new situation that Okri had made up. The fact is that abikus (or ogbanjes, the Igbo equivalent) are part and parcel of West African culture. So, Azaro's whole story is not pure fancy; it is myth in its deepest sense.

Once you realize that, everything is clearer, isn't it? The various episodes, such as the political mayhem or Madame Koto's gradual transformation, can be seen in the light of myth. The abiku child is not just a metaphor or an allegory (though Okri uses it ALSO as an allegory, at the end of the novel): Azaro's predicament means that he wants to escape his epic status to become a real person, a human being of flesh and blood. All along the novel, his double vision is at the same time an advantage and a threat.

By presenting the reader with a character who wants to become something else than a mythical figure, Okri passes a metafictional comment on writing and novel-reading.

Guillaume Cingal

(Author of an 84-page pre-PHD memoir: "Child characters in Breyten Breytenbach's MEMORY OF SNOW AND OF DUST, Nuruddin Farah's MAPS and Ben Okri's THE FAMISHED ROAD.)

Obviously, there is a lot that should be said or that I could say about Ben Okri's fiction, but I wouldn't have enough room here.


Storytelling in the key of myth, in the rapture of magic.   April 24, 2006
Dr. Kasumu O. Salawu (Maplewood, New Jersey USA)
16 out of 17 found this review helpful

Cave-dwelling humans told their own stories with well placed marks on walls, precise sounds and bodily gestures. In all cultures, to delight and instruct, people tell stories and recite poetry that imitate life as they experience it but not necessarily palpably. Not only are these stories different but so are their modes of presentation. This review should prepare you for the interwoven anecdotes that comprise The Famished Road.

I am a Yoruba and the narrator of Okri's book, Azaro, is an `abiku' which literarily means `one born to die' in the Yoruba language. Ultimately, we are all born to die so abiku refers strictly to consecutive deaths of an infant; it underscores the eternal belief of Yoruba people in reincarnation and names like Kokumo, (will not die again); Malomo, (don't leave again); and Rotimi, (stay with me), are supplications to abiku children. When the pleas are not heeded, radical measures are sometimes taken in the form of branding an already dead infant with the hope that the blemish will lead to its rejection by peers in the spirit world. It is almost always observed that a child born right after a `branded' one not only returns with the exact `mutilation' as a birthmark but it also does not return to the spirit world! One must suspend disbelief to experience osmosis with Azaro's accounts.

From time immemorial, raconteurs told stories replete with myths and superstitions. In much more recent memory, the philosopher, Aristotle, proposed structural elements for Western stories: plot, to unify time, space and action in linear, palpable and causal ways respectively; characters that are rationally motivated; realistic points of view, settings and so on. Sans Aristotle, sans formula, this story is narrated at different levels of consciousness: it is a diffusion of the impossible or implausible into earthly possibilities, suffused with space-time-warping phenomena; anecdotes narrated in the media of haunting by the dead; dreams that foreshadow or flash back to reality; Kafkaesque transformations into creatures interpenetrating one another; grotesque, carnivalesque occurrences and laughable terror a la Rabelais; mutual, mimetic dramatization among incongruous acts; simultaneous dealings with God and the devil and other rich ambiguities! As we are alone in our essential moments - birth and death, for example, Okri may have made us forbidden eavesdroppers on Azaro's essential moments.

If we believe some deconstructionists, Okri's narrator, Azaro, chronicled the emergence of Nigeria from British colonialism through the third eye that writers in the tradition of Magical Realism employ to create fantastic and surreal images, allegories, metaphors and symbolisms. Another character in the book, Madame Koto, stands in for the dilemma of the upper class in that country when confronted with insufferable deprivation of others. The use of Magical Realists' techniques for political indictment situates Okri squarely in a literary lineage stretching from Kafka through Jorge Luis Borges, (The Garden of Forking Paths, [Collection]), and Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez. Nobel laureate, Marquez, (One Hundred Years of Solitude), wrote "The Autumn of the Patriarch" in 1975 to expose one of the darkest hours of political history in Latin America. Itself an oxymoron, Magical Realism, resonates with the opposite worlds it yokes together in this book.

Not totally unrelated to the effects of colonialism, Okri has probably ingested as much English Literature as any other former winner of the Booker Prize for literature so he knows when and how to break rules to achieve his own designs. This book confirms that he is an extraordinary prose stylist and his turns of phrase are worth the price of the book. Please visit the bookstore near you and read the last line in The Famished Road and if it moves you, you are ready for a forgotten human journey.



sad and joyous and beautiful   December 15, 2005
Esther (Los Angeles, CA USA)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful

I checked this book out from the library and returned it before finishing it because I thought it was repetitive and tedious, albeit beautifully written. I returned to the library for the book two weeks later because I couldn't get the characters and prose out of my mind. Scenes and narratives from this book will stay with me for years to come. I've copied passages down that took my breath away with their beauty so that I can read them over again. A life-affirming, haunting work that will have a lasting and tremendous impact on my worldview. A book unlike any other I have read.


Ponderous in its creation, yet it satisfies on all fronts!   March 14, 2005
Christian Engler (Woburn, Massachusetts)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful

War, strife, misery, corruption, poverty, emotional and physical brutality, hypocracy, intimidation. It is a short list, but they are indeed the fundamentally potent ingredients that could make anyone who is simmering in the total unhappiness of it all truly yearn unceasingly for an existence in another realm, where the chains of seemingly unending suffering are simply melted away into nonexistence. In poverty laced and psychologically decimated "modern" Nigeria, as written by Ben Okri, the Nigerian society as a whole or a good chunk of it, would be one camp where death would be a liberating gift from the undesired toilings of harsh day-to-day realities. With mellifluous simplicity, Ben Okri creates duel worlds: one heavenly, one earthly. And in the duality, there is a responsive spirit-child named Azaro who can cross the bridge of life into death and death into life, as one who consistently has near death experiences. But each requires a sacrifice, for when Azaro traverses into the dimension of spirit, he must leave behind his mother and father who love him, though much of his earthly actions bring about stress and frustration, as well as joy and pleasure--more of the former than the latter, however. But if he stays in the land of the living, he must endure the hardships that are naturally affixed to it. He gets himself stuck, as if in a Catch-22, hankering for both the spiritual and earthly worlds. Through the vast array of characters: Mom, Dad, Madam Koto, the Photographer, various political yes-men, the boxer Green Leapard, the blind man, Ade, et cetera, the raw yet richly cultured Afrocentric aura looms lushly outward in an almost literary 3-D manner. Village life, culture and mythical behavior, as well as the "game" or "tragedy" (you choose) of African politics via the technique of magical realism is very much fleshed out. The simplicity of the writing style in no way, shape or form mollifies the palpable depth of the characters who must live and survive in an all-too-consuming oppressive environment that would seem quite alien to most of us---in an upper/middle class creme de la creme point of view. The Famished Road is dense, plodding and absolutely wild in its limitlessness of human imagination, a genuine wordy and intellectual tour de force if ever there was one and certainly worthy of its Booker Prize!