The Famished Road by Ben Okri (English) Paperback Book

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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.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher 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.

Author Biography

Ben Okri was born in Lagos, Nigeria. He lives in London.

Review Quote

"A dazzling achievement for any writer in any language." --The New York Times Book Review "A masterpiece if one ever existed." --The Boston Globe "Dazzling, hypnotic...a true feast for the word hungry." --San Francisco Chronicle

Discussion Question for Reading Group Guide

1. The Famished Road is a novel that sets out, not to tell a conventional narrative, but to map and explain an entire way of life and an entire world view -- that of an Africa where myths are real, the dead are ever-present and the line between dream and reality is blurred. How important for Okri''s purposes is the particular artistic style he has chosen for the book, a style that might be characterised as magical realism? What would you say are the main characteristics of this style? 2. The spirit-child is a central myth in Nigerian folklore, one who dislikes "the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe" (p.3). Why does Okri choose to have a spirit-child as the narrator of his novel? Why a child? What does this spirit-child tell us about "the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see" (p.3)? What does it say about Okri''s own attitude towards spirituality and its relation to everyday life? 3. The Famished Road does not deal in conventional narrative sequence, and yet Okri is able to give the book a structure that allows the story to develop dynamically and purposefully. How does he do this? How does he create a balance between Azaro''s visions and the naturalistic description of the settlement, between action set-pieces and scenes of more quiet contemplation? Does this balance help the flow of the novel? 4. Despite being 500 pages long, the novel has only four main characters - Azaro, his mother and father, and Madam Koto the bar owner. Does this emphasis on only four characters prove a help or a hindrance in the development of the book''s story? How does Okri develop his individual characters? How important to the book''s success is Azaro''s relationship with his father? 5. Madame Koto undergoes a dramatic change in the course of the novel. Can you plot the development of that change? How far are the shifts in fortune that affect her and her bar, a metaphor for the wider changes affecting the country as a whole? 6. There are many instances in the book where Azaro''s description of his father blur the line between myth and reality. On page 199, for instance, "a gentle wind" becomes "a dark figure, towering but bowed", before solidifying into Azaro''s father. How does this affect our understanding of the character of Azaro''s father? What does Okri wish us to see in him? 7. It becomes apparent in the course of the book that Azaro and his parents live in a country that has just freed itself from colonisation. What does Okri make clear are the legacies of this new-found independence? How far does he agree with the woman in the crowd who says: "This Independence has brought only trouble" (p.169)? 8. "Our old people are very powerful in spirit. They have all kinds of powers ... We are forgetting these powers. Now, all the power that people have is selfishness, money and politics" (p.70). How well does Azaro''s father''s description of the clash of old customers and the new politics of modernity fit with Okri''s own opinion of the changes taking place? Can you chart those changes? How important to Okri is ritual and tradition? 9. "The world is full of riddles that only the dead can answer" (p.75). What does Okri mean by this phrase? Is he endorsing the importance of tradition? What does the sentence imply about the role and meaning of the spirits trying to lure Azaro back to paradise? 10. The Famished Road , or "the road of our lives" (p.180), is an ever-present image in the novel. What do you understand the famished road to mean? Is there any similarity between Okri''s understanding of the famished road and, say, Ancient Greek ideas of fate? 11. Animals are ever-present in Azaro''s narrative, particularly in his visions. Which are the animals that most commonly appear in these dreams? What purpose do they fulfil? If they are acting simply as metaphors, can you guess what they signify? 12. In one vision, Azaro sees the trees "running away from human habitation" (p.243). How does Okri characterise the growing urbanisation that takes place in the book? What is his attitude to it? 13. White men hardly make an appearance in the book, and yet their legacy seems pervasive. "They are greedy," says Azaro''s mother. "They want to own the whole world and conquer the sun" (p.282). What references to white men can you find in the book? How is their legacy assessed by Okri? 14. Some critics have argued that the central strengths of The Famished Road lie less in Azaro''s fevered visions than in the book''s sympathetic portrayal of family ties and its naturalistic portrayal of ordinary African life. Do you judge Okri''s use of Azaro''s vision as successful or not? 15. "We are precious, and one day our suffering will turn into wonders of the earth" (p.338). "Our country is an abiku country. Like the spirit-child, it keeps coming and going. One day it will decide to remain" (p.478). Despite the suffering and corruption he depicts in the book, does Okri share the father''s final optimistic vision?

Excerpt from Book

from the INTRODUCTION by Vanessa Guignery ''I felt on the edge of reality.'' These are the words uttered by the narrator of The Famished Road as he recalls his venturing to a location that looked like ''a strange fairyland in the real world''. The sentence perfectly encapsulates the ambivalent and fragile position of a child whose wanderings take him and the readers of Okri''s third novel to a multiplicity of places set in the real or the supernatural realm, or a mixture of both. A child of miracles, who knows no boundaries and observes what surrounds him with eyes wide open, Azaro is our very special guide into Okri''s enchanting and terrifying worlds. In 1991, the publication of The Famished Road marked the emergence of a unique literary voice, that of a writer who was born in 1959 in Minna, a railway town in central Nigeria, nineteen months before his country''s independence, lived in London between the ages of one-and-a-half and seven, reluctantly travelled back to Nigeria with his parents and siblings in 1966, and eventually decided to settle in Great Britain at the age of nineteen. While the violence of the Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-70 greatly affected the young boy, life in Lagos sparked his imagination, teaching him that ''there was no one world-view, but as many worlds as there are ways of seeing''. As a teenager, he closely observed his father practising law and taking up the cases of destitute people, which led him to develop a fascination for human beings and more particularly the voiceless and unheard victims of social inequalities. In 1978, he left Nigeria for London, which he considered the home of literature, and two years later published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows , in the Longman ''Drumbeat'' series, a showcase for recent African writing. This was followed by The Landscapes Within in 1981 and two collections of short stories ( Incidents at the Shrine in 1986 and Stars of the New Curfew in 1988), which prompted Chinua Achebe to name Okri as one of the new generation of African writers ''who hold a promise of becoming really major''. The promise was fulfilled with The Famished Road which won the Booker Prize, making Okri, at the time, the youngest recipient and first black African writer to receive the award. Three decades after winning the prestigious prize, Okri, for whom writing is an Arcadia, declared that ''the flame and the hunger and the dreams'' were still there. The Famished Road , Okri noted, was the outcome of a decade of experimentation with form, tone and tincture, in order to find the elixir that would enable him to create the imaginary world he had in mind. This implied, on the part of the author, a Blakean cleansing of the doors of perception to see, hear, smell, taste and touch the world differently. The novel invites readers to do likewise, to open their senses and minds, to look at and for what is not directly visible, ''not the things we s[ee], but the things in between, the myths in between, the tone in between'', to quote Okri. When a character announces: ''We must look at the world with new eyes'', he is echoing what Okri wrote in several poems, short stories and essays, and this new insight pertains to both the visible and the invisible. The reader is therefore encouraged to let go of previous assumptions, entrenched reading habits and Western binary conceptions which separate the living and the dead, the real and the supernatural. Instead, The Famished Road privileges circulation, the free flow of ideas, sensations, stories and worlds without boundaries. This implies that, in accordance with West African modes of being and perceiving, the spirits and the dead are part of the everyday environment of the living, making it possible for them all to eat at the same table and for a character of the compound to fight with the ghost of a deceased boxer. Okri recalls that his own childhood was ''populated with spirits, ghosts, deaths, war, hunger, magic, transformations, sorceries'', and his awareness of an animist conception of the world led him to have ''a humble and magical relationship with reality''. Just as Okri is ''a crossroads person, a child of intersection'' between Africa and Europe, The Famished Road is a sea of stories deriving from West African mythology, European traditions and Eastern philosophies, which mix and intertwine with the author''s own creations. In addition to the enigmatic stories his mother used to tell him and left him puzzling over for years afterwards, and the philosophical books, Greek and Roman myths, and Western classics his father liked so much, Okri let his mind resonate with many realities while writing the novel: ''the realities of Africa, but also the literary realities of writing in London, in full consciousness of a universal literary and artistic tradition, from Homer to Okigbo, from Monteverdi to Jazz, from cave paintings through Giotto and African art to Picasso and modernist and post-modernist trends''. Homer''s Odyssey , which the main character reads to his father in the evening and which Okri refers to as ''an immortal tale of the cosmic difficulties of the return'', has close affinities with The Famished Road . Okri noted about the epic poem: ''More than a book, it is a civilization, and yet it is an intimate story of a man, a family, an adventure'', words which find a particular resonance with his own novel. It is certainly not surprising that Okri, who is an adept of the blurring of frontiers between nations and traditions, should have said: ''I feel Homer to be African.'' The Famished Road also carries with it echoes of the Urhobo myths and realities the writer was introduced to by his father, and of the West African oral traditions and the wealth of folktales which inspired the mythical and supernatural works of Nigerian writers D. O. Fagunwa in Yoruba ( Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter''s Saga , 1938) and Amos Tutuola in English ( The Palm-Wine Drinkard , 1952). Okri supplements these rich traditions with reminiscences of the original form of social realism that was developed by Chinua Achebe and of the encounter of the political and the mythical in the writings of Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka. When Okri praised Soyinka for his reconciliation of ''the social with the mythic, the comic with the tragic'', he could have been referring to his own work. As for the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo, of whom Okri is a great admirer, his combination of indigenous traditions with Western modernism and antiquity in his poetry may bring to mind Okri''s own cultural and literary eclecticism. Although The Famished Road emerged from the reverberation of all these poems, tales, fables and myths in the writer''s mind, the novel creates its own unique worlds, stories, voices and styles. Okri remarked that the writer has to get rid of ''the tendency to always anchor what is being done within a tradition'' as such classifi ation destroys any attempt at originality, and the duty of the artist is specifically to cut new paths, ''travel the untravelled road'', open new vistas. The Famished Road was born from a dissatisfaction with the limitations of realism and marks a departure from Okri''s earlier novels which focused on social and political issues in Lagos, and were written in the mode of social realism without any forays into the supernatural (in 1996, Okri would revise his second novel and ''transfigure'' it into Dangerous Love , which he described as ''a kind of twin'' to The Famished Road in its ''search for an artistic language with which to express the true nature of reality''). After completing these books, Okri explained that he ''got tired of the traditional artifices and realism of the novel'' and that ''the naturalism of Tolstoy, Dickens and Balzac did not speak to the world [he] grew up in''. He started questioning what constitutes the essence of reality and developed a mode of writing that he described in various interviews as ''trans-realism'', ''a deeper kind of realism'' or ''a realism with many more dimensions''. In doing so, he was veering away not only from Western naturalism but also from the African literary trend of Chinua Achebe or Ngu~ gi~ wa Thiong''o (in Kenya), which had appropriated the form of the Western novel and used the mould of cultural nationalism to depict the indigenous African past. But neither did Okri strictly follow the model of Amos Tutuola''s folkloric dream-narratives in which the supernatural prevails and is most of the time clearly differentiated from the real world. In The Famished Road , Okri opens a third way by weaving together the realistic and the esoteric, while never letting the mythopoeic and fantastic dimensions occupy the whole space (as would tend to be the case in his 1995 novel Astonishing the Gods , written ''in a mode of enchantment'' while fasting). He is thus, as he said in an interview, ''inside and outside of realism'': by incorporating mythical, animist and magical beliefs and manifestations within the real world, he is abiding by the African (especially Urhobo and Yoruba) belief that the spirits and the dead are an integral part of the world of the living. In his foreword to Cervantes''s The Dialogue of the Dogs (1613), Okri notes that the Spanish writer ''loves to mirror the world through odd angles and tangents'', here by the means of two dogs talking about the follies, treacheries and mean-mindedness of humanity. The Famished Road likewise propounds an original perspective on the human condition, thanks to a child who is able to see ''the world of our reality and the world of spiritual reality simultaneously'', one who is aware of anterior and future lives, and has access to other c

Details ISBN0385425139 Author Ben Okri Short Title FAMISHED ROAD Pages 512 Publisher Anchor Books Language English ISBN-10 0385425139 ISBN-13 9780385425131 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY FIC Year 1993 Publication Date 1993-05-31 Imprint Anchor DOI 10.1604/9780385425131 Audience General/Trade We've got this

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