Ahead of the Curve

The Famished Road by Ben Okri
New York : Anchor Books, 1993.
500 p. ; 24 cm.   

There have been some great YA books recently by authors that have used the rich well of Nigerian history and culture to create their fictional worlds.  I'm thinking of the incredibly talented Nnedi Okorafor (reviewed here) and the highly successful Tomi Ayedemi.  But I had no idea that Ben Okri was setting wildly fantastic fiction in Nigeria (his homeland) back in the early 1990s. 

I had simply wanted to read some of the African fiction that we have in our collection and I liked the title (!) and the fact that The Famished Road had won the prestigious Booker Prize back in 1991. When I started reading it, I had no idea it was such a romp through the strange and surreal.  The novel follows the harsh life of a boy born to poor parents in Nigeria as the country transitions from the depredations of colonialism to the depredations of corrupt and predatory capitalism with its violence of political upheaval. 

There is a lot to admire in the novel: a rich surrealism and dreamy realism that weaves back and forth through the novel, and some moments that are painfully relevant, e.g. battles between the Rich People's party and the Poor People's party.  I think the weakness of the book is that it is long and rambling and would have had a lot more emotional power if had been edited by about 30%.  That being said, I think it would make an interesting pairing with Achebe's Things Fall Apart, or with Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. Also it's a wildly original novel.

I don't think it's a book I'd highly recommend to students unless someone was asking about African fiction or magical realism.

Out There with Kafka

(image from Steppenwolf Theater production, fall 2008)

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
New York : Vintage International, 2006, c2005.
1st Vintage International ed.
467 p. ; 21 cm.

This one has a bit of everything: a sophisticated but sensitive 15 year old main character, Colonel Sanders, a downpour of leeches, some sex, an old man who talks to cats, time travel, a road trip with a 29 year old trucker and even a library (yes, a library!) as one of the main settings.

I first read a Murakami novel about 10 years ago - The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and it was a tour de force, so I was looking forward to this one which is on the AP Lit recommended list.

I was not disappointed in this novel. It is extremely creative and interesting with wonderfully memorable characters - from Ms. Saeki, the librarian stuck in her lost love from decades ago, to the endearing Mr. Nakata who is illiterate but wise and able to converse with cats. The novel can definitely be described as magical realism, but it is much more than than that. It is a fable, a murder mystery, a coming of age story, a meditation on love, time, loyalty, goodness and evil.

This is not an "easy" novel, but it should really appeal to students who love to read literature and are looking for something truly unusual, creative and yet with a lot of substance - a book that will stay with you long after you've put it down.

One Wild Trip Down the Mississippi

Total Oblivion, More or Less by Alan Deniro
New York : Spectra/Ballantine Books, c2009.
306 p. ; 21 cm.

Reading this book was an interesting experience for me. I liked it a lot at the beginning - started to dislike it a lot about a third of the way through, but then found myself liking it - and unable to put it down until I finished it. Not bad for a book!

The book opens in St. Paul Minnesota as the US has fallen apart to roving bands of horsemen called the Scythians. Sixteen year old Macy and her family flee, go to a refugee camp, and end up escaping on a boat just before the camp is overrun by marauders.

Along the way they encounter more and more bizarre events, suffer from the plague - which creates the strangest buboes in the world - and split up and reunite. The book has a wacky atmosphere of gloom about it, but is tempered by adventure and genuine family love and loyalty. In many ways, I found this a much better book than this year's Printz winner, Ship Breaker.

I'd recommend this to readers who like Neil Gaiman but want something a little darker. I also think any reader who enjoys an unusual setting - such as the Chaos Walking books - might find this a good read, too.

Not Mad About Mad Cow Adventures

Going Bovine
by Libba Bray
New York: Delacorte Press, 2009.
480 p. ; 22 cm.

All right, this book garnered great praise and won the 2010 Printz Award - but... I just couldn't lose myself in this overwrought book. The back of the book offers breathless comparisons to Catcher in the Rye and predicts that it may well become a cult classic. I don't think so. It's hard to put my finger on what I don't like about this book, but perhaps a few excerpts will illustrate:

"'Who the heck is Don Quicks-oat?' That's what Chet King wants to know.

It's early February, six weeks into the new semester, and we're in English class, which for most of us is an excruciating exercise in staying awake through the great classics of literature. These works - groundbreaking, incendiary, timeless - have been pureed by the curriculum monsters into a digestible pabulum of themes and factoids we can spew back on a test. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave...." (p.6)

***

"After some minor league pleading with Mom, she agrees to let me take the Turdmobile, her crap-brown box of a car. It's ugly but it runs, and it's better than the bus when you're late. All down the block, the lawns are alive with men on riding mowers. They gallop across their yards, whipping them into shape, in control of those few square feet of ground. All hail the suburban action heroes!" (p.39)

I just don't buy it. The voice is of an adult writing as if a teen. I think what made Catcher in the Rye so unbelievably great, was its pure originality. There's nothing about this character that's original. He's cynical about school, jocks, and suburbia...yeah? A real cult classic will have a protagonist who loves suburbia and who's school is both inspirational and dull and complicated - now that I will get my attention.

The plot of the story is creative and original, though, featuring the hero who is literally losing his mind to mad cow disease. Is the narrative real or in his head? For this the book deserves great praise, in that it's action puts you very much inside the mind of someone who's mind is disintegrating and becoming increasingly unreliable.

My experience with this book is that it just doesn't circulate all that much, and the several kids who checked it out did not recommend it, alas.