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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #136248 in Books
• Published on: 1993-05-01
• Released on: 1993-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Amazon.com
You have never read a novel like this one. Winner of the 1991 Booker Prize for fiction, The Famished Road tells the story of Azaro, a spirit-child. Though spirit-children rarely stay long in the painful world of the living, when Azaro is born he chooses to fight death: "I wanted," he says, "to make happy the bruised face of the woman who would become my mother." Survival in his chaotic African village is a struggle, though. Azaro and his family must contend with hunger, disease, and violence, as well as the boy's spirit-companions, who are constantly trying to trick him back into their world. Okri fills his tale with unforgettable images and characters: the bereaved policeman and his wife, who try to adopt Azaro and dress him in their dead son's clothes; the photographer who documents life in the village and displays his pictures in a cabinet by the roadside; Madame Koto, "plump as a mighty fruit," who runs the local bar; the King of the Road, who gets hungrier the more he eats.

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

From Publishers Weekly
Teeming with fevered, apocalyptic visions as well as harrowing scenes of violence and wretched poverty, this mythic novel by Nigerian short-story writer ( Stars of the New Curfew ) and poet Okri won the 1991 Booker Prize. The narrator, Azaro, is a spirit child who maintains his ties to the supernatural world. Possessed by " boiling hallucinations, " he can see the invisible, grotesque demons and witches who prey on his family and neighbors in an African ghetto community. For him (and for the reader), the passage from the real to the fantastic world is seamless and constant; many of the characters--the political thugs, grasping landlords and brutal bosses--are as bizarre as the evil spirits who empower them. In a series of vignettes, Azaro chronicles the daily life of his small community: appalling hunger and squalor relieved by bloody riots and rowdy, drunken parties; inhuman working conditions and rat-infested homes. The cyclical nature of history dooms human beings to walk the road of their lives fighting corruption and evil in each generation, fated to repeat the errors of the past without making the ultimate progress that will redeem the world. Okri's magical realism is distinctive; his prose is charged with passion and energy, electrifying in its imagery. The sheer bulk of episodes, many of which are repetitious in their evocation of supernatural phenomena, tends to slow narrative momentum, but they build to a powerful, compassionate vision of modern Africa and the magical heritage of its myths.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In this fantasy novel, winner of the 1991 Booker Prize, the spirit-child Azaro is reluctantly born on earth again and again--this time into a Nigerian family. The family intrigues him, and, "tired of going and coming," he breaks his pact to return to the spirit-world at first opportunity. His fellow spirits torment him, but he perseveres. Azaro's earthly father is a hard-working laborer who tries to make money boxing, though he is often badly beaten. Struggling to make the human journey more than a "famished road," the family finds that life is "full of riddles only the dead can answer," and often not even they can. But through Azaro, whose persistent, poetic spirit admirably reflects Okri's prose, the family alternates between the dead and the living in search of understanding. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/92.
- Kenneth Mintz, Hoboken P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

This book is very much like the title
And like the title, it will take you on a long and strange (for Western eyes) journey. I liked the humanity and the constant failings of the characters and how Okri is able to project the same kind of social problems and issues found in any community into his fictional village. That the place is small doesn't mean that the stakes are. How he brings politics, status-seeking, public bombast, family issues and the recurring unlearned lessons of society into his story is reminiscent of Naipaul (as has been repeatedly pointed out). But unlike Naipaul who reveals the story with dialogue and detail, Okri's intermingling of the physical world with the world of local folklore and spirituality, as if it were an entire second half of a person's constant existence, gives the novel an added dimension. It also allows the author to give you perspectives into the people and the region that would normally get relegated to subtext. Often, that spiritual realm becomes more real than the African village they all call home.

I really enjoyed the novel, but it was long and it was winding. I did feel at the end that I knew the people and I knew the place, and I didn't mind at all that Okri asked me to check my beliefs of what is reality and what is spirituality at the front cover to get me to that destination.

Now, if someone could recommend a place where I could get a good pepper-soup and cup of palm wine...

Favorite of favorites!
I read this book 5 years ago, yet it stays with me. I think of many of the characters regularly. Of the family relationships. Of the magic of childhood and Africa and parenthood. It's mystical and my very favoirite of the magical realism genre.

One of the Most Wonderful Books Ever...
in my humble opinion.

I was truly surprised to see that others had a rough time reading this book. Although my grasp of West African mythology is only as strong as my relationship with Vodou, I found this book entrancing.

Despite the fact that my degree is in literature, I do not often meet books that pull me in and through the way this one did. I found myself completely wrapped in the story & followed with my full attention.

It would sound trite to say that this book changed my life for the better, yet it would also be true.