a waking-dream inspiring dread like nothing else i've ever read ( )

I wonder if David Lynch has ever read Tutuola.

Also, The Palm-Wine Drinkard has more murder of whole villages, including babies, than I expected. ( )

So there's a scene where the evasive Death is being pursued, but he isn't at home, he's in the yam garden. I thought, Candide! There was hope but alas I don't like novels drenched in Folk Lore and the sinuous path never again crackled my imagination. Recommended for friends of [b:The Storyteller|53931|The Storyteller|Mario Vargas Llosa|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1437445804s/53931.jpg|2545389] or [b:The Hakawati|2774912|The Hakawati|Rabih Alameddine|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328035350s/2774912.jpg|1994762]. ( )

This combination of two novellas in one edition by Nigerian author, Amos Tutuola, was quite interesting. Written in the early 1950s, both stories read like mythology meets pen and paper. Both stories are about cultural and personal transitions and conjure up the image of being shared orally around a campfire. I cannot honestly say that I liked the stories so much as I found the biographical information about the author and his folktale style very interesting. I preferred "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", which read like the fever dream of a young boy lost in a world turned inside out by war. I could hold on to a sense of the boy's struggle in that story more than I could grasp meaning in "The Palm-Wine" Drinkard". ( )

The Palm-Wine Drinkard was recommended to me as a great surrealistic ghost story a la Murakami. I just couldn't get into it, but I think that part of the problem is that it needs to be consumed in one or two sittings, like an oral story since that is the style in which it is told. Alas, I cannot carve out this time during the day (it's FREAKY) before the library wants its copy back. Perhaps I'll revisit this during the summer for a lazy day at Bells Beach.