Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14553 in Books
• Published on: 1977-03-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 125 pages

Customer Reviews

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 reading the story itself, I found a class of literature that was completely different from East and West. This is not merely a folk tell, the writer has got unimaginable way of thinking in his brain. Read the first paragraph and you will find you are shocked. You can't stop reading until it is finished.

Surrealy inventive.
Though Tutuola did not consider himself a writer, more a collector of folk stories, this does not affect how affecting the 'Palm-Wine Drinkard' can be. I have never read anything quite so surreal, linguistically inventive or bizzarely compelling. Anyone with an interest in West African culture, folk tales in general or the stranger side of the human imagination should own a copy.

Oral tradition as text
The Palm-wine Drinkard is a myth and cannot really be read as a novel. It is in style and contents very similar to the numerous myths relayed by Joseph Campbell in his volumes of Mythology, The Masks of God. But Amos Tutola offers no explanations and so the reader is left in the dark.

I'm not saying it isn't interesting, but just don't buy it in the hope you can read it and gain an understanding of some part of African culture, or The Human Condition, on par with Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" for instance.