“When I looked round she had disappeared. I began, I think, to hallucinate. I saw the secrets of the town dancing in the street: young men with the disease that melted their faces, beautiful young girls with snakes coming out of their ears, I saw skeletons dancing with fat women.”
A collection of six stories by Ben Okri, he is a different storyteller.
This was my second book of Okri. I had first read him in his Booker-winning novel, The Famished Road and I loved that book. Mostly his characters sit on the fence, between the real and spirit world. Here in this collection too, he has heavily deployed the same adroitness. Stories of Africa, of Lagos and of Nigeria, and of another world, I say!
Writing is lucid and stories impact you, they are not as spooky somewhere yet their spirits can bring on some twitchiness. The stories are balanced and woven around the normal city and village lives in Nigeria. Wartime events, poverty, selling medicines by a salesman and bridges and city and jungles and all the worldly things but also the taste of myth and fables!
It depends on the taste, if you have a liking for the concept of a writer who writes modern age tales but in fairy tale style, with some horror, with some apparition, then I guess you may like the book. Stories are fast-paced and written in a very simple language and can find yourself tingling with eagerness and delirium.
It’s hallucinatory prose! You can see pink elephants without being drunk!
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