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Ben okwi quotes about endings10/29/2022 ![]() Okri’s writing style and the way in which he has presented his story felt to me like a culmination of Salman Rushdie’s and A.S. Some of the imagery and descriptions used were nice, but they did lose their power in their constant repetitions. Perhaps if Azaro had been given a realistic range of emotions, and had handled events in different ways occasionally, my opinion of him would be different. I did not grow to like him as a character – something which I think is important in such long novels in which you, as a reader, have to invest a lot of your time. ![]() Azaro was often void of emotion at what should have been the most challenging episodes in his life, and he felt two-dimensional in consequence. The first person narrative perspective did work well on the whole, but there were occasions in which it felt a little flat. Some of the scenes also made me – a self-confessed squeamish reader – feel rather sick. Something about this made the entire novel feel rather off-kilter, rendering it both uneven and inconsistent. There is no real thread of plot leading from beginning to end rather, days in Azaro’s life are described one after another, so that the whole becomes incredibly repetitive. However, the story soon leaves this intrigue behind, and becomes almost cyclical in the violent scenes it presents, the harm which befalls Azaro and his parents, and the way in which they use food – which is unfailingly described as ‘delicious’ – to comfort themselves. He blurs the lines between fiction and reality in quite an odd way. Magical realism abounds from the first page, and a dreamlike haze is woven within Okri’s words, so that one never quite knows what is real and what is imagined. The spirit world, and how spirits interact with humans on earth, is focused upon throughout, and the narrator of the piece is Azaro, a ‘spirit-child’, who lives in a ghetto in an unnamed African city during British colonial rule.Īt the beginning of The Famished Road, the story is engaging – provided, of course, that the reader is able to suspend his or her disbelief. ![]() ![]() I had previously heard of it as a revered work, but I wasn’t really sure what to expect from it when I began to read. My choice for our July Book Club read was Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, a novel which won the Booker Prize in 1991. ![]()
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