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Customer Reviews (15)

Great.
This book came to me new and in verygood condition. I recommend this seller to everybody. I love Amos Tutuola books.. They are the best!

GREAT BOOK!
I read this book in my English class and I was a little hesitant to read it at first but once I got into the book I loved it. It is such an interesting concept especially my life in the bush of ghosts... Highly recommend it!

Too sui generis to be labeled magical realism...
Too sui generis to be labeled a work of magic realism: the author is more like a medium channeling the collective dreams of his people into an English that has absorbed the rhythms of an age when men and animals spoke the same language.

Amos Tutuola, Curse of the Spell-Checker
"The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town" was Amos Tutuola's first book, for which he invented an African-English dialect, the most extreme non-standard English ever seen in print. The anonymous hero begins in a life of bliss, nothing to do all day but drink prodigious quantities of palm-wine prepared by his expert palm-wine tapster. When the latter dies after a fall from a palm-tree, the hero sets out to find him wherever dead people go, and he is launched into a vertiginous series of what, for lack of any other word, we'll have to call Adventures.

Tutuola lives unselfconsciously within African tradition, in forests darker and deeper than any imagined by the Brothers Grimm, where animism, magic and the supernatural are taken for granted, where missionaries, Administrations and Western rationalism are unknown. The story is gruesome, spooky, wildly unpredictable, incessant, wondrous, monstrous, boastful, innocent, pitiless, infantile, violent, disturbing, haphazard and plain loco. If you can't let go of logic and standard narrative expectations, stay away. If you can, you'll find this the most curious and excellent story you could hope to read.

Tutuola wrote many follow-ups, never quite recapturing the white-heat of "PWD". They are all the mixture as before, and all worth reading (though I wouldn't want to have to read them one after another.) "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", made famous by an 80s Talking Heads album, is likely the best, and until this reprint was the hardest to find. The word "unique" is often used loosely. But Amos Tutuola Is Unique. Nothing else remotely like these books exists in the English language.

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. ... Read more

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wraps ... Read more

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Undaunted through the Mythosphere
A wild romp, most of the meaning of which is probably inaccesible, butdelightful and portenous and rich.Worth reading, worth studying, worthunderstanding

More than a folk tale
I bought the Bangla translated version of this book from a second-hand bookstore in Bangladesh. That one had biography of Amos Tutuola and a brief introduction about African folk tale, particularly the unique style of delivering the story by talking, acting and dancing. When I started readingthe story itself, I found a class of literature that was completelydifferent from East and West. This is not merely a folk tell, the writerhas got unimaginable way of thinking in his brain. Read the first paragraphand you will find you are shocked. You can't stop reading until it isfinished.

Sparkling Darkly by Padma J. Thornlyre
Amos Tutuola, a Nigerian writing in heavily-inflected English, transports his reader in an instant to a world which is at once magical and real, and more authentic than most of what's described as "magical realism". Tutuola draws from an oral tradition that is millenia old and, wizardlike, wrenches this ancient voice out of the bush and into the contemporary world. Darkly sparkling, "The Palm-Wine Drinkard" is gruesomely fantastical, erotic for its sheer sensuality, and utterly absorbing...as when the narrator is chased through a forest by bouncing skulls through which the shrill wind is whistling. One is removed to a magical realm, yet never leaves the African bush. Tutuola is a shaman, really, who composes odysseys. And the reader hears him chuckle even at the darkest of moments. For those of us who often grow civilization-weary, "The Palm-Wine Drinkard" is a wine unto itself, heavily hallucinatory! Highly recommended. ... Read more

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Amos Tutuola is one of Africa's most controversial authors. The reviews and essays in this volume are grouped chronologically to allow the reader to follow Tutuola's literary career and his unsteady journey to respectability. ... Read more

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Takes a thematic approach to this West African author whose works symbolize the African condition and its persistence from the colonial to the postcolonial period. ... Read more

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The "Wild Hunter" in this fictional autobiography is transported to five towns, each of which is inhabited by mischievous ghosts who harass and sometimes seriously threaten him. Through wit, cunning, and the help of a magic charm, the protagonist escapes their tortures. ... Read more

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The author ranks as one of the foremost living traditional African storytellers - as recognised by the acclaim of his first book, The Palmvine Drinkard. This book includes seven folktales especially for young adults, but of universal appeal. Beautiful black and white ink drawings illustrate the tales whose cast of characters include humans, a goddess, an elephant woman, a boa constrictor and a shell-man. ... Read more

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This book focuses on the first works produced by three talented West Africans who felt an urge to express themselves in print. These creative individuals were pioneers in a literary movement that gathered force and swept across Africa with remarkable speed in the latter half of the twentieth century, producing distinctive national literatures in new nation states that were in the process of freeing themselves from the legacy of colonial rule. Writers such as these helped to shape and reinforce that movement toward self-definition by creating works that were indisputably African. How did such writers emerge? What led them to write? Which influences and life experiences proved to be most decisive in their formation? Why did they choose to express themselves in the ways that they did? This book attempts to answer such questions by examining in detail each author s earliest compositions and by charting the direction of his later development. What is most striking when viewing these three writers side by side is how remarkably different they are from one another. They reflect the cultural diversity one finds today in Africa, where contesting forces of tradition and modernity have transformed the lives of individuals in a variety of interesting ways. Amos Tutuola, Cyprian Ekwensi and Ayi Kwei Armah are products of this changing social environment, and each has responded in a creative manner to the peculiar pressures, challenges, and opportunities in such a world. By following their own instincts and proclivities as writers, they have enlarged and collectively enriched the verbal culture of contemporary Africa. This lively, compelling collection of essays offers many insights into the early careers of three of West Africa s best-known novelists. In typical fashion, Lindfors leaves no stone unturned in his detailed archival work. His interviews and biographical discoveries raise fresh questions about key figures in West Africa s national literatures. Early West African Writers is a thoughtful and provocative book, challenging readers to rethink familiar literary categories as well as addressing broader questions of African nationhood and identity.Stephanie NewellProfessor of English, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton No scholar has done more than Bernth Lindfors to uncover the initial developments that led to the growth of that astounding flowering of writing in West Africa in the 1960s and 70s. Now he follows his indispensable collections of essays, Early Achebe and Early Soyinka, with this new collection on the early writings and publication history of Amos Tutuola, Cyprian Ekwensi, and Ayi Kwei Armah writers, as Lindfors says, 'as different as night, dawn, and day.' Lindfors combines detailed and meticulous scholarship with an engagingly readable style. These essays and revelation of previously unknown early writing and documents are essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the complex influences and events which shaped these three major writers and brought them to the attention of publishers and readers in Africa, England and America.C.L.InnesEmeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures, University of Kent ... Read more

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Magical Realism at it's Best
This is a fantastic book and a milestone in post-postmodern/poststructuralist literature using the techniques of Magical Realism. As a Google search will turn up, Magical Realism expresses the nostalgia of global modernity for the traditional worlds it has vanquished and subsumed. Far from representing an alternative to or a subversion of an emergent world order, magical realism is both an effect of and a vehicle for globalization, itself only the latest phase of a centuries-long process of modernization. At one time understood to be mainly, if not exclusively, a Latin American phenomenon, magical realism has emerged over the last three decades as an artistic movement of international significance. As writers from Latin America, North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East have joined a literary movement attracting an ever widening international audience, the magical realist novel has arguably become the preeminent form of fiction in the contemporary world. Tutuola's myth's come from the Yoruba religious tradition and mythology of Nigeria.

The neat synopsis normally given for a realist novel is unattainable in this type of work because the story is mediated to us only through loose and oten disjointed plots and pieces of stories intricately conjoined. It consists of several stoires within a story-of the main story with a journey motif and with digressions that are philosophical, sociological, psycholgoical, historical and religious in their discursive origins. The thread, in a sequence of sporadic happenings throughout the whole stretch of the main character's journey of discovery, weaves its way along, tying together the scattered and floating story lines, events and difuse epsisodes.

Myths and local beliefs are part of the real, life-world, not that they exist next to the real world

This is serous fiction and not merely escapist. ... Read more

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The author of this work takes issue with the prevalent use of "oral tradition" in the criticism of Europhone written literature as a cultural matrix. Instead, he proposes a view of literary tradition as the outcome of numerous acts of positioning in relation to indigenous resources. ... Read more

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A collection of stories drawn from Yoruba legend and tradition, containing characters from folklore, archetypal figures from Yoruba society and the supernatural. Born in Nigeria, Amos Tutuola's other works include "The Palm Wine Drunkard." ... Read more

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I love it.
I received this book very fast and in great condition. The stories are interesting and I recommend this seller to everybody. I hope to buy more books from this seller. ... Read more

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A fascinating collage of myth and tall tales
Every now and then the world's attention is drawn to a strange figure in the world of arts, a figure who "doesn't belong", who has not paid the proper dues and hasn't struggled up through the usual channels.No, that person suddenly rockets into the artistic firmament, does things in a totally unconventional way, and is immediately pounced upon and torn apart by those who have studied, worked, and sweated, dreaming of brilliant success.I think of somebody like Grandma Moses, who didn't start to paint until she was 78 and never attended a single art class, didn't know about a single "artistic convention", yet became one of the most popular American artists ever.The critics rewarded her by calling her "primitive".Yeah, right.Then, there was Niko Pirosmanishvili, a Georgian painter, who died in obscure poverty in 1918, having painted startlingly original images on any material he could get his hands on.The title "primitive" was bestowed on him also.Right here in my home town we had J.O.J. Frost, who painted scenes of the Marblehead he'd known as a child and events in the town's history.He painted on odd boards and tried, unsuccessfully, to sell his works for a nickel or a dime.After he died, he was recognized as a true artist and today his works are in New York and Washington.You can't get hold of one for love or less than a huge amount of money.A primitive.Amos Tutuola is a member of this little band, an original, a genius, a man who had no training, but just wanted to tell a lot of stories.If he'd written them in Yoruba, his mother tongue, we would never have heard his name.He wrote them in English, an English suffused with the tones and twists of West Africa.And guess what.Some African critics even felt ashamed of Tutuola's work, as it was not modern or European enough for them.Too primitive, right ? That word again.OK, for sure he doesn't write as smoothly as Hemingway or Turgenev; his grammar and spelling may leave something to be desired.But for those people who have not read Tutuola---don't miss your chance.If you love a story, if you love color and imagination, if you could like tales full of witches, magic, devils, and strange towns, if you are not totally wedded to the literary conventions set down by the critics, by the English departments of the world, then read Tutuola."The Palm Wine Drinkard", "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", or FEATHER WOMAN OF THE JUNGLE---all are great.

Tutuola's stories certainly do have connections to local Nigerian myths, traditional stories told for centuries.I will leave structural analysis to those so inclined.Unless you are familiar with the myths, though, everything will seem new.It seemed to me as I read through the account of six fabulous journeys that Tutuola's imagination had been fired by the cinema, both American and Indian.When mixed with the Yoruba tales, you certainly do have a fantastic result.If you are only interested in conventional novels, probably you'd better skip this book, but if you like Grandma Moses, if you like works by anyone who just fires away regardless of what critics say, then you're going to love FEATHER WOMAN OF THE JUNGLE.Original.Imaginative.Outstanding. ... Read more

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an enchanting African fable
Amos Tutuola is a wonderful writer from Nigeria.He specializes in a kind of modernization of classic African lore.He is surely steeped in a lot of the myth and religion of the Yoruba. Simbi and the Satyr of the DarkJungle is a wonderful tale.It begins with a wealthy Simbi growing boredof her fairy tale (ivory tower, perhaps?) existence.She wants to learn ofthe Poverty and Punishment.This beginning conjures thoughts of a youngSiddhartha discovering suffering.But make no mistake, Tutuola is not justtrying to rewrite the tale of Buddha.This is his own story.Simbiencounters terrible strife and suffering on her voyage.She learns what aterrible mistake it was to intentionally undertake to suffer.I enjoy thispoint.One should not bring suffering onto themselves.There is enoughreal suffering in the world already.It is a point that should be welltaken but we shall see.I must also comment on the humor that Tutuolapeppers throughout this tale.He is a writer with a comic flair.This isa fabulous fable for the twentieth as well as twenty-first centuries. ... Read more

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After 18-year-old Adebisi inherits her father's hunting profession, she searches for her four brothers who vanished in the Jungle of the Pygmies before she was born. ... Read more

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Trade paperback. ... Read more

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I have the juju
This is an excellent story about a hunter who is trying to find a cure from a witch herbalist. Like in his other books the main character seems to embody several characters which is taken to its extreme by the end of the book when is judged by the spirit of his kidney (called Judge Kidney).
Tutuola is one of the best known Nigerian authors. His writing style is unique and his talent has been promoted by no less than Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot. You really should read this book.

Stylish excursion into the wild
Amos Tutuola is one of the handful of master stylists in English of the 20th century. ``Witch-herbalist of the Remote Town'' is a mature work. Comparing it with his first published work (``Palm-wine Drinkard'')demonstrates that Tutuola is, in fact, a stylist and not, as it once seemedpossible, a naive product of an unusual and scanty education in English inNigeria. The compelling factor in his style is rhythm, presumablyrelated to his mother tongue of Yoruba. It has something of the cyclicalnature of extended drumming -- it is hard to stop reading it.Plot andcharacterization are not important in Tutuola's writing.``Witch-herbalist'' is a simple story of a father's love for his child. ... Read more