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.

It is hard not to give an equivocal review of "The Famished Road". I would have liked it more if I had read it some years ago when I was more into writers like Thomas Pynchon, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Salman Rushdie. Comparing Okri to those writers should give you an idea of what this book is like: long, complicated, often surreal (the term "magical realism" is used in discussions of this book), and sometimes confusing. Okri weaves many elements of traditional Nigerian folklore into his novel, but the form and structure are very much in the tradition of the modern English novel. I can't get help but feel that this book seems to be written for an audience of professors, grad-students, and people who are very serious about the novel as an art form. Those aren't necessarily bad things, indeed for many readers those are the best qualities a book can have. I wonder if many Nigerians have read this book, and if not, if a book popular in Nigeria might be more interesting and informative than "The Famished Road". But that's the thing: being interested in the novel as an art form is not the same as wanting to read a book to learn something about Nigeria.

Another Nigerian writer whose works are often based on African folklore is Amos Tutuola.


Spirit Child in the world   September 20, 2004
C. Gilbert (Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
19 out of 19 found this review helpful

If you have read the rest of the reviews on this page, you will have already gotten the message that the book takes some effort to read. This, for me, was mostly true at the beginning. It was obvious straight away that it drew heavily from a tradition of mythology to which I had no access. It is not so much that this was a barrier to my being able to read it; it is more that I kept expecting it to be a barrier and initially fought the flow of the book, trying to make sense of things that were not important to understand precisely.

To my mind, there are several ways to read magic realism. One way is to understand all the mythology and all the references that are included and use that understanding to directly enrich the "real" level of the book. The other way is to let the real and the mythic flow together and hope that the author is skilled enough to knit the two elements such that you do not need an academic understanding to follow the story. I think that Okri is a terrifically talented writer, and I found that once I got over my initial discomfort I was more than able to follow the narrative. The plot, to me, did not seem particularly hidden or unclear and I did not have the feeling that it was written for academics.

_The Famished Road_ tells the story of Lazarus/Azaro, a spirit child who chooses to stay in the impoverished world of reality, rather than return to the ideal world of the spirits. His family struggles with the impotence of their situation, baffled by politics and poverty and conditions beyond their control. The world of the compound is full of magic both real and imagined as the characters search for a way to influence their lives in the face of forces which seem to make things inalterable. Myth becomes a kind of resistance against the politicians who fight in the street and hand out poisoned milk.

I found it beautiful to read, and only slightly less rich because I did not know the surrounding mythological setting. If you are interested in the book, do not be put off by the more frightening reviews. It is not as dense as it initially appears and once I got used to the prose, I found that it read quickly and very smoothly.


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



To the happy few...   November 20, 1998
14 out of 15 found this review helpful

I think there has been some kind of general misunderstanding about THE FAMISHED ROAD. The misunderstanding went on with SONGS OF ENCHANTMENT, its sequel.

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.


Never have so many words said so little   December 27, 2006
Jason Fisher (Dallas, TX USA)
8 out of 10 found this review helpful

Like one or two other reviewers here, I got more than half of the way through this book but eventually had to chuck it aside in frustration. I *wanted* to like it so much, but its plot (even using the word "plot" is being rather generous) is so circular, monotonous, and repetitive, that I just didn't feel I was getting anywhere. A very frustrating reading process. I pressed on for a long time, hoping the book was actually going somewhere -- and maybe it would have done had I persisted, but it's hard to imagine how or when or that it could have been worth the effort. So, even though some of Okri's language and imagery was remarkable, it just wasn't worth enduring the other 95% of the book. Maddening!