Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104706 in Books
• Published on: 1993-12-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Customer Reviews

fantastic
It's strange to read a book that you wished you had read years earlier. If I had read this book 20 years earlier, there would've been so many times I would've reflected on it.

ghostly
The introduction to My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, the first book in this two-for-one volume, makes you think that it's an anthropological work for class, not a story you're reading for fun. That's a shame, because these two stories are worth reading in their own right. But in comparison to the standard Western literary format, they are unquestionably different.

Most Western literature I read focuses on a cohesive narrative with a beginning, middle and end, a specific plot, and rich descriptions of characters, places, and emotions. That's not what happens here. Rather, the story unwinds in a very linear fashion, bit by bit, as the character passes through the ghost world he has stumbled into, seemingly at random. There is no surprise expressed by the protagonist when, for example, he meets a ghosts with televisions on her hands, or is transformed by a ghost into a monkey to go climb trees and pick nuts for the ghost to eat. These things are just stated as given, a part of the ongoing adventure. The passage of time is also a very fluid thing. A chapter, or several, can describe the events of a single hour and then a single sentence can describe the passing of a decade. It's a loose, free-flowing narrative built on the imagination of the author, and his ability to dream up ghosts wild, unexpected, and grotesque. It's an enjoyable ride but it takes some getting used to.

Wonderful tales of fantasy
Reading them evoked similarities with fairy tales of Western culture: supernatural forces, shape-shifting, "monsters," battles between good and evil, etc.

At the same time, however, I was struck at how dissimilar these stories were to any fairy tale I'd ever read, or any other tale I'd read for that matter.

There is a tone of ease to the stories, of a casual approach to danger. It is though our "heroes" understand the significance of the crises they face, but they throw off the challenges with a shrug, since in their world, the "natural" and the "supernatural" interact all of the time b/c they live in close proximity with one another. After all, what's the worst that could happen? Death, in both of these stories, is a relative term at best, and is usually correctible.

This casual approach gives the stories a freer feeling of adventure, and allows one to accept anything that happens in these stories, no matter how wild it gets, since Tutuola's imagination in these stories is by turns hilarious, psychedelic, grotesque, and even frightening, but at all times unique.

At the same time, one gets a small taste of the mysticism, culture, and psychology of the West African Yoruba, from which Tutuola in part derives his tales. That taste filled me with a feeling of an entirely different world, one about which I knew nothing, but at the same time, one to which I could relate, as Tutuola's themes of redemption and devotion are common to us all.

The results are two stories that I adored, with no reservations whatsoever. They are simply two of the most wonderful stories I've ever read. As far as children are concerned, while these stories are violent and could certainly inspire nightmares, I intend to challenge my daughter with these stories as soon as she's able to understand what I'm saying, because I think she'll find them just as exciting and adventurous as her old man does.

Without question one of the best books of the 20th century. I can't recommend it more.