The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi

“Sometimes it can be hard to really love someone or something when you can’t see anything of yourself in them.”

                I never knew about the mythical story behind the birth of twins in Nigeria until I read Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl. Jess, the heroine, lost her twin sister some years ago. The dead twin, however, struggles for re-existence in Harrison’s house.

                The myth is used as a metaphorical representation of culture clash. In the west, Jess is described as mad while in Africa, the belief is that the spirit of her dead twin must be appeased before she lives freely.

The Famished Road by Ben Okri

”A man can wander round the planet and still not move an inch. A man can have so much light in his mind and still not see what’s right in front of him.”

Yes, it is true: “Okri is incapable of writing a boring sentence.”  He paints (not write) each situation.

The Famished Road narrates the politics, history and future of a nation using the Nigerian Abiku myth. What /who is an Abiku? Simply put, a child born to die. 

The Abiku myth also has a universal feature.

Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau

Imagine yourself riding in a torrid bus filled with passengers; the day’s heat is also dancing in the bus. In a corner of the bus, you hear someone snivelling and changing seats. Why? He was consistently brushed by another passenger (maybe an old man). Now, how would you narrate the story?

                Exercises in Style tells the above story in ninety-nine amazing ways. The author experiments with voice, point-of-view, symbols, and metaphor, just to mention a few.

                Every writer or aspiring author, in my opinion, needs this kind of writing exercises. It encourages one to experiment with various forms of narrating a story.

Finding the star in Ben Okri's STARBOOK

STARBOOK is not an ordinary book. It is eerie and enigmatic. The story was passed onto the author by his mother.

There are different books in this book. Each book is weaved around a single theme. It talks about the quest of artists and art; the struggles of an artist in the contemporary world and importance of history in art.

                The strength of the book, to me, lies on the excellent use of African oral tradition. The author uses riddles, parables, paradoxes, songs and aphorisms to drive home his points. Simply put, this is a re-awakening of African narration.

                The sentences are simple but complex.  

                

Related losses in Ben Okri’s Dangerous Love

The novel captures the different faces of love an individual can encounter in a life time. First, love between man and wife (characterised by extra-marital affairs); second, love for a chosen career and third, the love that exists between citizens and country.

                Through out the novel, there is a constant revelation of the various kinds of love. Omovo, the main protagonists knows love but later realises his definition of love metamorphoses as events unfold.

                With an excellent eye and ear for detail, Okri tells a tale that is characterised by the African folkloric tradition.

News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

You are welcome to Colombia: a home of green land, bright sun and blue seas. The creatures of the environment enjoy the cool air and tales told by the whispering trees. Things changed as time progressed. The birth of one man changed the beautiful face that was once Colombia. The man's name is Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria. He changed the scheme of things and introduced a monstrous existence with his mixed acts--drug sales, murder, kidnapping and internecine wars.

Give it to Gabriel Marquez narrating the ordeal faced by some citizens during these ugly times with an angry-beautiful pen. He was vested with the job of narrating things as they were in those bloody years in Medellin, Colombia. As usual, he didn't fail the reader. Every page flourishes like a flower with a thorny stem.

The kidnapped characters in the book begin to lose their mental stability as they were isolated and put away from the outside world's reality. After they were release, one could still feel their suffering as they struggled with memory and fitting into normal live. Columbia, one may conclude, will never forget those years with a book like this.

It is a story worth reading!

China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston

You don’t need to be a sinophile to enjoy this book. It is a tale that uncovers the remarkable experiences faced by a particular generation of a Chinese family; their journey to the Golden Mountain (the US) and the incidents they witness on the so-called Golden Mountain.

The author narrates, beautifully, the ‘good, bad and ugly’ nature of living as an immigrant. It is a beautiful-cocktail-story. However, one must sip it gradually to avoid an intoxication caused by the unapologetic movement between times.

‘All that you’ll and feel will be illusion’

                Through the eyes of the young narrator, the reader is forced to either sympathise or empathise with the families in the book.