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apechild 's review for:
The Palm-Wine Drinkard
by Amos Tutuola
My thoughts back from 2007 when I read this, as recorded on bookcrossing at the time: I had a free day today and as it isn't a long book, I thought I would get it read. The first thing that hit me was the awful English, it took me a while to get used to it and I can understand how this would be off putting to people. I think it could have been edited and still kept the folkstory - oral tradition feel to it. Although I have to admit, the more I read, the more I didn't notice the bad use of language. Why we had to know at exactly what time everything happened, I'll never know!
So it's the story of a guy who likes his palm-wine so much, that when his palm-wine tapper dies, he takes a ten-year trip to the city of the dead to get his palm-wine tapper back. And meets a lot of strange characters along the way. It's definately got that old style oral tradition/folkstory feel to it in the way that the supernatural world blends with the "real" world and this is just accepted by all. The story about how he met his wife was a particular curiosity: her following the complete man from the market, who happened to be a skull who had just "rented" body parts off others. And when they got back to the skull's house, they had her sat on a large frog with a cowrie around her neck.
It's the second Nigerian writer I've read this year, and I prefered Achebe, but thank you Ibis3 for sharing this curiosity!
So it's the story of a guy who likes his palm-wine so much, that when his palm-wine tapper dies, he takes a ten-year trip to the city of the dead to get his palm-wine tapper back. And meets a lot of strange characters along the way. It's definately got that old style oral tradition/folkstory feel to it in the way that the supernatural world blends with the "real" world and this is just accepted by all. The story about how he met his wife was a particular curiosity: her following the complete man from the market, who happened to be a skull who had just "rented" body parts off others. And when they got back to the skull's house, they had her sat on a large frog with a cowrie around her neck.
It's the second Nigerian writer I've read this year, and I prefered Achebe, but thank you Ibis3 for sharing this curiosity!