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The Palm-Wine Drinkard & My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
When Amos Tutuola's first novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, appeared in 1952, it aroused exceptional worldwide interest. Drawing on the West African Yoruba oral folktale tradition, Tutuola described the odyssey of a devoted palm-wine drinker through a nightmare of fantastic adventure. Since then, The Palm-Wine Drinkard has been translated into more than 15 languages and has come to be regarded as a masterwork of one of Africa's most influential writers. Tutuola's second novel, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, recounts the fate of mortals who stray into the world of ghosts, the heart of the tropical forest. Here, as every hunter and traveler knows, mortals venture at great peril, and it is here that a small boy is left alone.
307 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1952
65 people are currently reading
2715 people want to read
About the author
Amos Tutuola
41 books216 followersAmos Tutuola (20 June 1920 – 8 June 1997) was a Nigerian writer famous for his books based in part on Yoruba folk-tales.
Despite his short formal education, Tutuola wrote his novels in English. His writing's grammar often relies more on Yoruba orality than on standard English.
Despite his short formal education, Tutuola wrote his novels in English. His writing's grammar often relies more on Yoruba orality than on standard English.
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July 2, 2025After a lifetime spent reading crazy books, I've found that this is the craziest book of all. It's a staggering and amazing book, and one that I think many will have difficulty in approaching "critically," but as an experience it's awesome.
I read Palm-Wine Drinkard first, then read other things, and came back a month later to read My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. I was impressed by Palm-Wine Drinkard. While Bush of Ghosts reads very much like a continuation of Palm-Wine Drinkard, I'd say it's even better as a book, and even more bizarre.
Tempting comparisons would include Alice in Wonderland, Dante's Inferno, The Popol Vuh, and Mabinogion. It has elements of trippy and entertaining fantasy/nightmare adventure, spiritual descent into the terrors of the supernatural and afterlife, exotic cultural literature with strong pagan influence, and raw anarchic folk literature.
But it is what it is, and it's none of the above, except for incidental similarities. It may not have received any direct influence from any such literature.
Language in the book is as amazing and bizarre as the tale which is narrated. There is no way for me to know how much this resembles genuine Nigerian Pidgin/Dialect, how much it was an expression of the author's own language innovation, and how much it may or may not have been "put on" by the writer. It doesn't matter because it's fascinating and entertaining as language.
Some readers may struggle with the work because they expect it to be comprehensible as allegory or symbolic expression, yet I believe that its character is more like that of folk literatures where the intent is either obscure or secondary to the experience aspect, the immersion into an other-worldly experience.
If you read the book, you must laugh. If you don't laugh, you're not in tune with the book. You may at first be uncomfortable: Am I laughing at the author, or with him? By the end, I think you'll have no doubt. This author has a great knack for entertaining, even in his telling of macabre, nightmarish, and oneiric tales.
Choose any one of the many adventures and episodes within the text, and ask yourself "could this be omitted without damaging the text?" Surprisingly, the answer is "yes!" Is this episode gratuitous? Superfluous? "yes!" But would I choose to omit it? "no!" The episodes do not contribute to driving forward of a narrative, in a direct cause-effect chain, and they do not belong to a rigidly structured logical form, with a clear thesis which is doggedly pursued. No. They are mostly included for their value as entertainment. The text could be half the length and still be great... but it wouldn't be as great.
This is radical literature.
I read Palm-Wine Drinkard first, then read other things, and came back a month later to read My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. I was impressed by Palm-Wine Drinkard. While Bush of Ghosts reads very much like a continuation of Palm-Wine Drinkard, I'd say it's even better as a book, and even more bizarre.
Tempting comparisons would include Alice in Wonderland, Dante's Inferno, The Popol Vuh, and Mabinogion. It has elements of trippy and entertaining fantasy/nightmare adventure, spiritual descent into the terrors of the supernatural and afterlife, exotic cultural literature with strong pagan influence, and raw anarchic folk literature.
But it is what it is, and it's none of the above, except for incidental similarities. It may not have received any direct influence from any such literature.
Language in the book is as amazing and bizarre as the tale which is narrated. There is no way for me to know how much this resembles genuine Nigerian Pidgin/Dialect, how much it was an expression of the author's own language innovation, and how much it may or may not have been "put on" by the writer. It doesn't matter because it's fascinating and entertaining as language.
Some readers may struggle with the work because they expect it to be comprehensible as allegory or symbolic expression, yet I believe that its character is more like that of folk literatures where the intent is either obscure or secondary to the experience aspect, the immersion into an other-worldly experience.
If you read the book, you must laugh. If you don't laugh, you're not in tune with the book. You may at first be uncomfortable: Am I laughing at the author, or with him? By the end, I think you'll have no doubt. This author has a great knack for entertaining, even in his telling of macabre, nightmarish, and oneiric tales.
Choose any one of the many adventures and episodes within the text, and ask yourself "could this be omitted without damaging the text?" Surprisingly, the answer is "yes!" Is this episode gratuitous? Superfluous? "yes!" But would I choose to omit it? "no!" The episodes do not contribute to driving forward of a narrative, in a direct cause-effect chain, and they do not belong to a rigidly structured logical form, with a clear thesis which is doggedly pursued. No. They are mostly included for their value as entertainment. The text could be half the length and still be great... but it wouldn't be as great.
This is radical literature.
Read
December 6, 2014Enter the Pantheon. See Amos Tutuola. I said ‘primitive’ in my first review of Tutuola. Primitive means ‘primary’, first to emerge. Unmediated in his immediacy. I mean this profoundly. My usual fare is in itself intensely mediated. Anxiety of influence? Whether there’s anxiety there or no, there is not only influence, but determination. Marguerite Young (and others) call it The Grand Tradition. You can’t write unless you know where you are and where you come from. Tutuola is first. Primitive. Unmediated.
Which is to say that his fiction emerges from an oral/folk tradition and is thus in its immediacy already mediated. But when his pen went to his paper (these two novels each written in their first draft in two days) he is all Tutuola ; the literary imagination which transforms the folk performances of traditional material (in a dramatizing and musicalizing and performing which may have no parallel in our European cultures) onto a written page and disseminates them to the world. This is a genius.
And we should keep one thing in mind, because it is true that Tutuola wrote in English. I’m just going to call it Tutuolish. But it is in no manner a decrepit English. Tutuolish is one of those things Heidegger calls a Quelle, a source of language, of the renewal of language. You’ve spent decades on the internet now, and you don’t need DFW to remind you how depraved is the English language as spoken in the USofA. Tutuola’s fiction is that kind of work which can reinvigorate and rejuvenate our language, our shared universal language. And I’ll stress that word universal because something went wrong early in Tutuola’s career when he was condemned by West African Intellectuals for making Africans look dumb ; when what in fact was happening was that Europeans were discovering something that they both had and had lost already, namely, a direct access to reality via an unmediated language and literature. And in this manner, Tutuola is both an African writer and a fictionist of the universal English language.
In other words, if you have even the slightest interest in fiction as a practice of the imagination, you must read Tutuola. Begin with this volume which contains his first two novels.
Which is to say that his fiction emerges from an oral/folk tradition and is thus in its immediacy already mediated. But when his pen went to his paper (these two novels each written in their first draft in two days) he is all Tutuola ; the literary imagination which transforms the folk performances of traditional material (in a dramatizing and musicalizing and performing which may have no parallel in our European cultures) onto a written page and disseminates them to the world. This is a genius.
And we should keep one thing in mind, because it is true that Tutuola wrote in English. I’m just going to call it Tutuolish. But it is in no manner a decrepit English. Tutuolish is one of those things Heidegger calls a Quelle, a source of language, of the renewal of language. You’ve spent decades on the internet now, and you don’t need DFW to remind you how depraved is the English language as spoken in the USofA. Tutuola’s fiction is that kind of work which can reinvigorate and rejuvenate our language, our shared universal language. And I’ll stress that word universal because something went wrong early in Tutuola’s career when he was condemned by West African Intellectuals for making Africans look dumb ; when what in fact was happening was that Europeans were discovering something that they both had and had lost already, namely, a direct access to reality via an unmediated language and literature. And in this manner, Tutuola is both an African writer and a fictionist of the universal English language.
In other words, if you have even the slightest interest in fiction as a practice of the imagination, you must read Tutuola. Begin with this volume which contains his first two novels.
February 13, 2019
“To see the mountain-creatures was not dangerous but to dance with them was the most dangerous” (293).
This is an unusual book. Tutuola, a Yoruba man, wrote this in the 1950s. It is an extended stay in fabulism.
A few words on the language of the books:
It was written in English, but it is the English of someone who has not completely mastered the language. It is full of grammatically incorrect constructions that make reading awkward and almost hallucinatory. However, it is also highly repetitive, which might normally be bad, but is actually good in that it facilitates adjustment to the strange grammar and increases reading speed. The net effect is an immediacy of language unlike anything I’ve read.
A few words on the content of the book:
When I was young I used to have recurring nightmares. They were seriously disturbing. I don’t know how I got the idea, but one day I suddenly knew that I could force an agency over the elements of that world and take power back. The only way out was through. This work reminds me of this: of fears coalesced and controlled through narrative: a catharsis of cathexis.
Recommended for:
Everyone who has not graded a stack of essays written by ELLs (English Language Learners- students whose primary language was not English) and people who have. Also, for alives and deads.
This is an unusual book. Tutuola, a Yoruba man, wrote this in the 1950s. It is an extended stay in fabulism.
A few words on the language of the books:
It was written in English, but it is the English of someone who has not completely mastered the language. It is full of grammatically incorrect constructions that make reading awkward and almost hallucinatory. However, it is also highly repetitive, which might normally be bad, but is actually good in that it facilitates adjustment to the strange grammar and increases reading speed. The net effect is an immediacy of language unlike anything I’ve read.
A few words on the content of the book:
When I was young I used to have recurring nightmares. They were seriously disturbing. I don’t know how I got the idea, but one day I suddenly knew that I could force an agency over the elements of that world and take power back. The only way out was through. This work reminds me of this: of fears coalesced and controlled through narrative: a catharsis of cathexis.
Recommended for:
Everyone who has not graded a stack of essays written by ELLs (English Language Learners- students whose primary language was not English) and people who have. Also, for alives and deads.
February 26, 2016
As with the previously-read My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, The Palm Wine Drinkard is the strangest of African adventure stories, myth and invention colliding in a fantastic nightmare journey, briskly delivered as Nigerian spoken-English oral tradition. This time, the story concerns a layabout (palm-wine drinkard being given as a sort of profession or life purpose here*) who discovers that no one can tap palm-wine fast enough for him to drink it following the death of his loyal tapster (who overindulges and falls out of a tree on the job). What is to be done? Clearly the only option is to travel to the town of the Deads and bring back the tapster, an occasion for much courage and resourcefulness that the drinkard is oddly equal to, preparing his Juju and keeping his wits about him whatever hallucinatory scenario descends upon him.
Though this was written a year earlier, it seems a little more cohesive as sustained narrative than Bush of Ghosts, with a stronger plot arc and more recurring elements. But as with the later story, its really the independent episodes that shine brightest, like the strange creepy cautionary tale of the Complete Gentlemen that turns up here. And without every turning to moralizing in any conventional sense, Tuotola imbues episodes like this one with suggestions of insight.
Anyway, it's a weird reading experience for sure, but a wholly unique one, equally entertaining as mythic adventure and self-projected ethnography.
*such professions are presented as essentially as good as any other. Later, the protagonist is unable to resolve a conflict between a man whose vocation is to borrow money and one whose vocation is to collect debts.
Though this was written a year earlier, it seems a little more cohesive as sustained narrative than Bush of Ghosts, with a stronger plot arc and more recurring elements. But as with the later story, its really the independent episodes that shine brightest, like the strange creepy cautionary tale of the Complete Gentlemen that turns up here. And without every turning to moralizing in any conventional sense, Tuotola imbues episodes like this one with suggestions of insight.
Anyway, it's a weird reading experience for sure, but a wholly unique one, equally entertaining as mythic adventure and self-projected ethnography.
*such professions are presented as essentially as good as any other. Later, the protagonist is unable to resolve a conflict between a man whose vocation is to borrow money and one whose vocation is to collect debts.
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March 5, 2016A lot has been said about Tutuola's grammar. But as Yoruba person myself, his grammar is all too familiar. This is exactly how a Yoruba person with limited (western) education would communicate in English.
So I'd call his grammar Yoruba-English. Tutuola just kind of showed me that grammar is not all that. Imagination is perhaps more important for writers.
That aside, I found myself laughing out loud in public. Tutuola's imagination is just crazy!
One of my favourite parts of the book: the encounter with the skull (which was inspired by the folktale of Olajumoke and Ori).
Many have said The Palmwine Drunkard is his best work. I have read My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, and Pauper, Brawler, and Slanderer. So I can agree.
So I'd call his grammar Yoruba-English. Tutuola just kind of showed me that grammar is not all that. Imagination is perhaps more important for writers.
That aside, I found myself laughing out loud in public. Tutuola's imagination is just crazy!
One of my favourite parts of the book: the encounter with the skull (which was inspired by the folktale of Olajumoke and Ori).
Many have said The Palmwine Drunkard is his best work. I have read My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, and Pauper, Brawler, and Slanderer. So I can agree.
July 9, 2022
Now these are something truly special - totally outside the bounds of conventional "hard writing rules" made ubiquitous by western academic curriculums, completely conscious of such a decision and completely confident in its unorthodox methods. But while Tutuola clearly knows what he's doing, his motivations don't seem to be to consciously reject the western modes to make a statement, rather these stories both have a tone of the author writing what he knows, disregarding any potential bewildered colonialist gawking and simply rolling with his culture's mythos and narratives and his own wild imagination. I would resort to my reductive comparisons as usual, something such as "like an African Ghibli film on LSD", but there's really nothing else I'm aware of that's like these - totally authentic African surrealist fantasy adventures, written less like literary works and more like oral myth, and in Tutuola's own Yoruban-English dialect where he does not mind himself with any of the rules of traditional syntax and grammar. These are not "primitive" works as racist white scholars will claim, they are deliberately crafted and exciting works of a singularly vivid imagination.
While both these short novels operate on similar wavelengths, there's enough variables within both that each distinguishes itself and enough to cement Tutuola's inimitable style as entirely his own. The narrator in 'Bush of Ghosts' is a mostly passive interlocuter, at the mercy of things he does not understand as they take him from situation to situation, much like a child [in fact Tutuola's style in this one often makes it feel properly like a child is telling you a story and the feeling of aging and growing agency is done subtly yet wonderfully in the narrative voice]. By contrast the protagonist in 'Palm-Wine' is more of an active force in seeking his goals [just give the man his damn wine], and while still beset upon by things he cannot comprehend he is himself more on the same wavelength of the supernatural beings he encounters, exemplified by how he can often go toe-to-toe with them or otherwise find some way to circumnavigate around them. So in the end both works feel like a sort of ying and yang to each other, complementarily telling two wild adventure stories working from opposite angles of the spectrum; one of seeking and one of trying to escape. The framing leads to interesting questions surrounding both narratives as well - for example, in 'Bush of Ghosts' has our protagonist been dead from the moment he separated from his brother, as a casualty in the war described in the opening, and his unknowing soul is simply traversing the beyond? And in 'Palm-Wine', what exactly is the nature of our protagonist, is he a human or truly a self-centered god as he claims in the beginning? As fantasy should, Tutuola allows his works to leave themselves open to interpretation and individual analysis.
Tutuola's varied uses of tone here are also a defining aspect of both novels, and he can flit totally seamlessly between ridiculous comedy and grotesque supernatural dread at the flick of a switch. And the storytelling and prose is so laconic and natural that it just works, because the nonchalant way every character reacts to their absurd surroundings makes it feel simply like life as it is for these people, all of which also works well within the fable framework. And it works even further in its ability to depict horror as a natural component of existence, especially in a place long ravaged by the talons of colonialism - in this mythic vision of West Africa wars, famine, slavery and exploitation still exists, and at times it seems as though both the physical reality and spiritual apparatuses that exist in this universe are stand-ins for these power structures, albeit in a way where the unique mysticism of the setting and its inhabitants are always in the foreground.
It's interesting how difficult it is to summarize what are essentially simple stories - the tale of a little boy lost in a "Spirited Away"-kind of afterlife trying to make it back home, and the story of a selfish drunkard adventuring into the world of spirits to bring back his servant - because the canvas Tutuola crafts to tell these tales is so completely its own. These tales liberate themselves from the restrictions much modern fantasy feels obliged to operate on, and the world here instead is one where magic just exists as an unquestioned elemental force, far more in line with supernaturalism as seen in traditional folklore than much modern fantasy, which is oft bogged down by its insistence on internal logic in order to justify the existence of the unreal, a choice which limits the creative tapestry of any given writer [just look at how ubiquitous the tired "hard vs. soft magic" debate is]. But Tutuola does not have any of these considerations - the fantastic instead works on its own free associative logic, a world where people can turn into animals and elements at will, where the physical worlds and spiritual worlds interlink at points that go unchallenged and are simply understood to just be, and one where existence itself is suffused with supernaturalism. Magic is magic here not in the way it is in Tolkien or Jordan terms but more in the way it exists in the Bible or the Epic of Gilgamesh - the world itself operates on myth and its own inhuman mechanics, beyond the sort of secular rationalism modern people are increasingly accustomed to.
While reading, all of this made me think - is fantasy limiting itself as a genre? A drawback of the internet and its ostensibly endless avenues of learning has been that ironically, people have become more insular in the information and ideas they are willing to consume, and with writing and media literacy this is especially apparent - many have unquestioningly internalized "how it should be done" in terms of writing a story, and the result can lead to a sort of frustrating closed-mindedness among many online creative communities. Naturally this extends to authors of fantastic fiction [especially as it is among the most popular nowadays], and I can't help but feel contemporary fantasy authors are at best limiting their styles and at worst neutering it under the pressure of ill-defined "writing rules" whose advice is typically stated as some kind of immovable fact. But fantasy is one of the few genres which has the capability of moving beyond these things sheerly by default, because the only limit of fantasy is the imagination of the author. The genre's commercialization and prevalence in popular culture has separated it from its natural strengths and commodified it, leading writers to fall back on tired western cultural tropes and cliches instead of radically transcending itself as it should always have the power to do. Tutuola's work here is an example of what fantasy can achieve when it is not restricted by this commodification and understands what it means to be fantasy - mythic, awe-inspiring, ostensibly unlimited in its scope.
And seeing as I'm primarily a writer of this type of thing, I'm especially glad to have read this volume, as I myself struggle with the genre's contemporary trappings despite consciously trying to unlearn [or at least rework] many of the rules that have been ingrained into me as an amateur author. And I think anyone who writes anything in the realms of non-realism should read these too, because they're wonderful examples of stories that work perfectly for what they are despite being completely contrary to much of what we are taught about "how" to write. But if you're just a reader and not interested in all that technical stuff, then you can also just sign up for this for the surreal, mythical, phantasmagoric adventures through West African folklore and beautifully executed tonal craziness, all told by one of the most uniquely voiced and charming storytellers you'll ever read.
"Immediately the whole Skull family heard the whistle when blew to them, they were rushing out to the place and before they could reach there, I had left their hole for the forest, but before I could travel about one hundred yards in the forest, they had rushed out from their hole to inside the forest and I was still running away with the lady. As these Skulls were chasing me about in the forest, they were rolling on the ground like large stones and also humming with terrible noise, but when I saw that they had nearly caught me or if I continued to run away like that, no doubt, they would catch me sooner, then I changed the lady to a kitten and put her inside my pocket and changed myself to a very small bird which I could describe as a "sparrow" in English language."
While both these short novels operate on similar wavelengths, there's enough variables within both that each distinguishes itself and enough to cement Tutuola's inimitable style as entirely his own. The narrator in 'Bush of Ghosts' is a mostly passive interlocuter, at the mercy of things he does not understand as they take him from situation to situation, much like a child [in fact Tutuola's style in this one often makes it feel properly like a child is telling you a story and the feeling of aging and growing agency is done subtly yet wonderfully in the narrative voice]. By contrast the protagonist in 'Palm-Wine' is more of an active force in seeking his goals [just give the man his damn wine], and while still beset upon by things he cannot comprehend he is himself more on the same wavelength of the supernatural beings he encounters, exemplified by how he can often go toe-to-toe with them or otherwise find some way to circumnavigate around them. So in the end both works feel like a sort of ying and yang to each other, complementarily telling two wild adventure stories working from opposite angles of the spectrum; one of seeking and one of trying to escape. The framing leads to interesting questions surrounding both narratives as well - for example, in 'Bush of Ghosts' has our protagonist been dead from the moment he separated from his brother, as a casualty in the war described in the opening, and his unknowing soul is simply traversing the beyond? And in 'Palm-Wine', what exactly is the nature of our protagonist, is he a human or truly a self-centered god as he claims in the beginning? As fantasy should, Tutuola allows his works to leave themselves open to interpretation and individual analysis.
Tutuola's varied uses of tone here are also a defining aspect of both novels, and he can flit totally seamlessly between ridiculous comedy and grotesque supernatural dread at the flick of a switch. And the storytelling and prose is so laconic and natural that it just works, because the nonchalant way every character reacts to their absurd surroundings makes it feel simply like life as it is for these people, all of which also works well within the fable framework. And it works even further in its ability to depict horror as a natural component of existence, especially in a place long ravaged by the talons of colonialism - in this mythic vision of West Africa wars, famine, slavery and exploitation still exists, and at times it seems as though both the physical reality and spiritual apparatuses that exist in this universe are stand-ins for these power structures, albeit in a way where the unique mysticism of the setting and its inhabitants are always in the foreground.
It's interesting how difficult it is to summarize what are essentially simple stories - the tale of a little boy lost in a "Spirited Away"-kind of afterlife trying to make it back home, and the story of a selfish drunkard adventuring into the world of spirits to bring back his servant - because the canvas Tutuola crafts to tell these tales is so completely its own. These tales liberate themselves from the restrictions much modern fantasy feels obliged to operate on, and the world here instead is one where magic just exists as an unquestioned elemental force, far more in line with supernaturalism as seen in traditional folklore than much modern fantasy, which is oft bogged down by its insistence on internal logic in order to justify the existence of the unreal, a choice which limits the creative tapestry of any given writer [just look at how ubiquitous the tired "hard vs. soft magic" debate is]. But Tutuola does not have any of these considerations - the fantastic instead works on its own free associative logic, a world where people can turn into animals and elements at will, where the physical worlds and spiritual worlds interlink at points that go unchallenged and are simply understood to just be, and one where existence itself is suffused with supernaturalism. Magic is magic here not in the way it is in Tolkien or Jordan terms but more in the way it exists in the Bible or the Epic of Gilgamesh - the world itself operates on myth and its own inhuman mechanics, beyond the sort of secular rationalism modern people are increasingly accustomed to.
While reading, all of this made me think - is fantasy limiting itself as a genre? A drawback of the internet and its ostensibly endless avenues of learning has been that ironically, people have become more insular in the information and ideas they are willing to consume, and with writing and media literacy this is especially apparent - many have unquestioningly internalized "how it should be done" in terms of writing a story, and the result can lead to a sort of frustrating closed-mindedness among many online creative communities. Naturally this extends to authors of fantastic fiction [especially as it is among the most popular nowadays], and I can't help but feel contemporary fantasy authors are at best limiting their styles and at worst neutering it under the pressure of ill-defined "writing rules" whose advice is typically stated as some kind of immovable fact. But fantasy is one of the few genres which has the capability of moving beyond these things sheerly by default, because the only limit of fantasy is the imagination of the author. The genre's commercialization and prevalence in popular culture has separated it from its natural strengths and commodified it, leading writers to fall back on tired western cultural tropes and cliches instead of radically transcending itself as it should always have the power to do. Tutuola's work here is an example of what fantasy can achieve when it is not restricted by this commodification and understands what it means to be fantasy - mythic, awe-inspiring, ostensibly unlimited in its scope.
And seeing as I'm primarily a writer of this type of thing, I'm especially glad to have read this volume, as I myself struggle with the genre's contemporary trappings despite consciously trying to unlearn [or at least rework] many of the rules that have been ingrained into me as an amateur author. And I think anyone who writes anything in the realms of non-realism should read these too, because they're wonderful examples of stories that work perfectly for what they are despite being completely contrary to much of what we are taught about "how" to write. But if you're just a reader and not interested in all that technical stuff, then you can also just sign up for this for the surreal, mythical, phantasmagoric adventures through West African folklore and beautifully executed tonal craziness, all told by one of the most uniquely voiced and charming storytellers you'll ever read.
"Immediately the whole Skull family heard the whistle when blew to them, they were rushing out to the place and before they could reach there, I had left their hole for the forest, but before I could travel about one hundred yards in the forest, they had rushed out from their hole to inside the forest and I was still running away with the lady. As these Skulls were chasing me about in the forest, they were rolling on the ground like large stones and also humming with terrible noise, but when I saw that they had nearly caught me or if I continued to run away like that, no doubt, they would catch me sooner, then I changed the lady to a kitten and put her inside my pocket and changed myself to a very small bird which I could describe as a "sparrow" in English language."
Read
September 24, 2018I'm tempted to call it "magical realism," but that would be all wrong. In its sheer weirdness, it seems more like a Nigerian version of a Miyazaki film, with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in particular reminding me so, so much of Spirited Away. I should point out that is a ringing-like-a-fucking-bell endorsement. What's especially amazing to me is how long ago this came out, and I can't begin to imagine how completely original this would have been back in the '50s.
April 13, 2020
Outside of giving a taste of Yoruba folktales, and the bygone novelty of being works from Africa written in English, I'm at a loss at to what other virtues there are in Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, as they are poorly written and the stitched together stories that comprise them are not well presented. Nowadays there simply must be better collections of Yoruba folktales available in English, that tell those tales with competent writing in a more compelling way, so I can't see any situation where I'd recommend Tutuola's works.
These stories don't have intentionally simplistic and grammatically incorrect writing like in works by Twain, Joyce, or Eco—Tutuola genuinely had only a rudimentary grasp of English, as shown in his brief autobiographical piece at the end of The Palm-Wine Drinkard. It’s not a gimmick. The books are often written as simplistic recitations of actions without any attempt to present those actions through interesting prose, and in the rare instances where Tutuola tries to write imagery it's often confusing and unclear. Given his limited education, it's impressive that Tutuola learned enough English to write anything at all—but that doesn't change the fact that his writing is bad.
In terms of the individual tales, part and parcel with the writing just being an account of a series of actions, there isn't a setup to these disjointed stories, rather the narrator will find himself in some new predicament and then escape it in short order, but never in a way that created any suspense or shows any cleverness. Compare it to a work like Journey to the West, which has a similar structure to The Palm-Wine Drinkard in particular, and Tutuola's tales are not told nearly as well. I've seen these stories called surreal and compared to Kafka, but that rings entirely false to me—Tutuola's tales read like a person rambling about a long series of dreams they had, one arbitrary event piling atop another, which is decidedly not something you can say about Kafka's works. Frankly, considering Tutuola's limited mastery of English, it would have been very difficult for him to deliver these stories effectively based on that alone, but the way he structures the tales does nothing to make up for his deficiencies in the language.
Folktales are difficult to translate into written prose—I found that even the amazing writer Italo Calvino had a hard time doing so in his collection of Italian folktales. Giving the same task to someone with only an elementary understanding of the language in which they're writing would necessarily pose an even greater challenge. It is a challenge that Tutuola does not even come close to meeting. Whether it mimics the pidgin English used in Nigeria successfully or not I couldn't say, but, regardless, the writing of The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is some of the worst I've come across in a very long time, and the stories told through those works are correspondingly bad. I give this book a 1/5, since, despite Tutuola obviously trying his best, I didn't find any redeeming qualities that would justify rating it any higher. If you want a much better book of non-Western mythology I strongly recommend Popol Vuh instead.
P.S. with it being touted as "the first African novel published in English outside of Africa," I can't help but suspect that The Palm-Wine Drinkard got published because an editor read that work, about an alcoholic stumbling from one encounter with monsters or spirits or strange tribes to the next, written in basic pidgin English throughout, and thought "I can sell this, it's exactly what people expect a piece of writing out of Africa to be." My Life in the Bush of Ghosts did nothing to make me rethink that suspicion.
These stories don't have intentionally simplistic and grammatically incorrect writing like in works by Twain, Joyce, or Eco—Tutuola genuinely had only a rudimentary grasp of English, as shown in his brief autobiographical piece at the end of The Palm-Wine Drinkard. It’s not a gimmick. The books are often written as simplistic recitations of actions without any attempt to present those actions through interesting prose, and in the rare instances where Tutuola tries to write imagery it's often confusing and unclear. Given his limited education, it's impressive that Tutuola learned enough English to write anything at all—but that doesn't change the fact that his writing is bad.
In terms of the individual tales, part and parcel with the writing just being an account of a series of actions, there isn't a setup to these disjointed stories, rather the narrator will find himself in some new predicament and then escape it in short order, but never in a way that created any suspense or shows any cleverness. Compare it to a work like Journey to the West, which has a similar structure to The Palm-Wine Drinkard in particular, and Tutuola's tales are not told nearly as well. I've seen these stories called surreal and compared to Kafka, but that rings entirely false to me—Tutuola's tales read like a person rambling about a long series of dreams they had, one arbitrary event piling atop another, which is decidedly not something you can say about Kafka's works. Frankly, considering Tutuola's limited mastery of English, it would have been very difficult for him to deliver these stories effectively based on that alone, but the way he structures the tales does nothing to make up for his deficiencies in the language.
Folktales are difficult to translate into written prose—I found that even the amazing writer Italo Calvino had a hard time doing so in his collection of Italian folktales. Giving the same task to someone with only an elementary understanding of the language in which they're writing would necessarily pose an even greater challenge. It is a challenge that Tutuola does not even come close to meeting. Whether it mimics the pidgin English used in Nigeria successfully or not I couldn't say, but, regardless, the writing of The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is some of the worst I've come across in a very long time, and the stories told through those works are correspondingly bad. I give this book a 1/5, since, despite Tutuola obviously trying his best, I didn't find any redeeming qualities that would justify rating it any higher. If you want a much better book of non-Western mythology I strongly recommend Popol Vuh instead.
P.S. with it being touted as "the first African novel published in English outside of Africa," I can't help but suspect that The Palm-Wine Drinkard got published because an editor read that work, about an alcoholic stumbling from one encounter with monsters or spirits or strange tribes to the next, written in basic pidgin English throughout, and thought "I can sell this, it's exactly what people expect a piece of writing out of Africa to be." My Life in the Bush of Ghosts did nothing to make me rethink that suspicion.
August 29, 2007
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, written in the 1950s in a still-colonized Nigeria, is unlike anything you’ve ever read; it tells the story of a boy who is running from a slave war with his older brother, and they are forced to part on the road; the little boy runs into the bush, eats some fruit from the wrong tree, and finds himself in the world of ghosts, where he goes through an endless series of gruesome and bizarre adventures which he keeps only just surviving. The ghosts are terrifying, their bodies are monstrous, and they are all very different from one another in inventive ways. Its so outrageous its sometimes very funny. The story is told through the boy’s matter-of-fact voice, in an English that is full of vivid vernacular Nigerian ways of putting things. Eventually (and yet suddenly) the boy is twenty, and though he still wants to go home, he has managed to find a town that suits him among the dead, along the way marrying a “super-lady,” having a half-ghost child, and studying and qualifying as a “full dead person.” He does get out, in the end, thanks to a ghost-woman covered in sores with a television screen in her hand that shows him how, only to be taken as a slave by humans and sold to his own brother, who finally recognizes him, in a very ambiguous happy ending; he partly wants to return to the land of the ghosts, and who can blame him when the “real” world is equally brutal and capricious. It’s like a fairy tale but there’s more unrelenting horror, blood, flies and shit; it’s like magical realism, but much more alarming, unromantic, and foreign rather than exotic.
With a little help from Achille Mbembe’s brilliant article about this book, I’m tempted to read the novel as an allegory of post-slavery African modernity, the shadow modernity of the Western industrial revolution, the abject space produced in order to sustain white subjectivity and its dream of rational mastery of the world, so that it had to be made dirty to our clean, mad to our sane, backwards and upside down to our march of progress, violent to our ordered, the zone of both mob rule and senseless arcane laws rather than justice. The book makes the reader feel what having one’s sovereignty taken from one is like, through the seven year old boy who is captured, made into a cow, a servant, a pitcher covered in blood and excrement, who is exhibited and beaten, lost in a world whose language he does not speak. The boy slowly assimilates into this world of ghosts, and its very unclear whether this means he is finally gaining agency and subjectivity, or losing his humanity; when he returns to the world of humans he has no emotional, ethical or political reaction to the fact that his beloved long-lost brother is now a brutal slave-owner. He’s just glad to be recognized, to be given his personhood back from this new state of vulnerability he finds himself in. But it seems to me ultimately that the book isn’t a clear or deliberate allegory in the way I’m trying to read it, instead it throws a series of signifiers that evoke various tragic histories into the dark magically expanding bag of the narrative, like the one the boy is thrown into by a particularly smelly ghost, scrambling any coherent making of sense in the literary tradition we are used to. Phew!
With a little help from Achille Mbembe’s brilliant article about this book, I’m tempted to read the novel as an allegory of post-slavery African modernity, the shadow modernity of the Western industrial revolution, the abject space produced in order to sustain white subjectivity and its dream of rational mastery of the world, so that it had to be made dirty to our clean, mad to our sane, backwards and upside down to our march of progress, violent to our ordered, the zone of both mob rule and senseless arcane laws rather than justice. The book makes the reader feel what having one’s sovereignty taken from one is like, through the seven year old boy who is captured, made into a cow, a servant, a pitcher covered in blood and excrement, who is exhibited and beaten, lost in a world whose language he does not speak. The boy slowly assimilates into this world of ghosts, and its very unclear whether this means he is finally gaining agency and subjectivity, or losing his humanity; when he returns to the world of humans he has no emotional, ethical or political reaction to the fact that his beloved long-lost brother is now a brutal slave-owner. He’s just glad to be recognized, to be given his personhood back from this new state of vulnerability he finds himself in. But it seems to me ultimately that the book isn’t a clear or deliberate allegory in the way I’m trying to read it, instead it throws a series of signifiers that evoke various tragic histories into the dark magically expanding bag of the narrative, like the one the boy is thrown into by a particularly smelly ghost, scrambling any coherent making of sense in the literary tradition we are used to. Phew!
September 28, 2013
This book is awesome. A dude just sat down and was like, "I'm just gonna try to come up with the craziest story ever written. Any kind of insane adventure that pops into my mind I'm just gonna put it in there. If my protagonist backs himself into a corner, I'm just gonna have him use some juju to get out of it, just so I can put him back into an even insaner adventure. Where's my pen?"
Some people will read this and be tempted to put it into a larger cultural perspective. They will use words like "allegory" and "symbolism" and will attempt to place the story into an intellectual framework that helps us to understand the changing face of post-colonial Africa. But it's seriously just a dude making up a bunch of ridiculously awesome stuff off the top of his head. For example:
That's fantastic. Also the "complete gentleman" who is really just a skull with rented body parts is keeping a woman prisoner by making her sit on a bull frog. That happens in this story. Not enough for you? How about if the hero were to burn down a house with a baby in it, only to return to the site to find a "half-bodied" baby that rises up out of the ashes and commands the man and his wife to carry him on their heads while he eats everything in site? BOOM! Done. Page 35. Also, the baby talks with a "lower voice like a telephone" and weighs "at least 28 lbs". Now you might think I'm spoiling the book for you by telling you these things. But there are 125 pages in this book, and something like these things happens on nearly every page. I laughed out loud through most of it, and thoroughly enjoyed the ride.
Some people will read this and be tempted to put it into a larger cultural perspective. They will use words like "allegory" and "symbolism" and will attempt to place the story into an intellectual framework that helps us to understand the changing face of post-colonial Africa. But it's seriously just a dude making up a bunch of ridiculously awesome stuff off the top of his head. For example:
When I travelled with him a distance of about twelve miles away to the market, the gentleman left the really road on which we were travelling and branched into an endless forest and I was following him, but as I did not want him to see that I was following him, then I used one of my juju which changed me into a lizard and followed him. But after I had travelled with him a distance of about twenty-five miles away in this endless forest, he began to pull out all the parts of his body and return them to the owners, and paid them.
That's fantastic. Also the "complete gentleman" who is really just a skull with rented body parts is keeping a woman prisoner by making her sit on a bull frog. That happens in this story. Not enough for you? How about if the hero were to burn down a house with a baby in it, only to return to the site to find a "half-bodied" baby that rises up out of the ashes and commands the man and his wife to carry him on their heads while he eats everything in site? BOOM! Done. Page 35. Also, the baby talks with a "lower voice like a telephone" and weighs "at least 28 lbs". Now you might think I'm spoiling the book for you by telling you these things. But there are 125 pages in this book, and something like these things happens on nearly every page. I laughed out loud through most of it, and thoroughly enjoyed the ride.
Want to read
November 19, 2015Okay Zad, if you say so.
November 7, 2007
Yes, very little to compare this to, as surreal and fantastic as any journey taken by Jarry or Swift.
July 30, 2012
Interesting to read a narrative entirely devoid of Western conventions.
December 22, 2022
So first thing's first: This book is a double feature and I only read The Palm-Wine Drinkard. It's the only one I wanted to read but is so brief I'm tempted to read My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. For now, I will not commit and write a review for only one half.
Really I'm not sure what to say, there are a lot of reasons why this novella is good and a lot of reasons why it's bad. I'm hesitant to make excuses for the bad reasons (the excuses are very easy to make.. like: I haven't read any other African lit, or this is written in West African Pidgin English which drastically changes the tone, or how can I critically approach this novel with no Yoruba mythos knowledge) and am leaning more towards saying that this novella was overall enjoyable.
A lot of criticism I've seen online is that the book is too weird, or the language is not even Pidgin but Tutuola being weird, or the stories told are just things that you hear growing up in a Yoruba culture and subsequently the book is just writing them down.
I think that the book is not too weird, that the stories aren't strung together in an elegant and concise way, I think that some of the stories are very interesting, that the maybe Pidgin/maybe Tutuola Tone is really enjoyable.
I have this expectation that, even in the case of folktales steeped in myth, the writing and story still be elegant and beautiful and that's something I think Tutuola doesn't do a great job of. I read somewhere that this is his first book and that he wrote it in 2 days so I don't think that those circumstances help.
I'm really really torn on a 3 or 2 for the rating. I think it should be a 2 and while I don't want it to be that low, it does not belong in the company of the Carver, Carson, or Vonnegut 3's.
Really I'm not sure what to say, there are a lot of reasons why this novella is good and a lot of reasons why it's bad. I'm hesitant to make excuses for the bad reasons (the excuses are very easy to make.. like: I haven't read any other African lit, or this is written in West African Pidgin English which drastically changes the tone, or how can I critically approach this novel with no Yoruba mythos knowledge) and am leaning more towards saying that this novella was overall enjoyable.
A lot of criticism I've seen online is that the book is too weird, or the language is not even Pidgin but Tutuola being weird, or the stories told are just things that you hear growing up in a Yoruba culture and subsequently the book is just writing them down.
I think that the book is not too weird, that the stories aren't strung together in an elegant and concise way, I think that some of the stories are very interesting, that the maybe Pidgin/maybe Tutuola Tone is really enjoyable.
I have this expectation that, even in the case of folktales steeped in myth, the writing and story still be elegant and beautiful and that's something I think Tutuola doesn't do a great job of. I read somewhere that this is his first book and that he wrote it in 2 days so I don't think that those circumstances help.
I'm really really torn on a 3 or 2 for the rating. I think it should be a 2 and while I don't want it to be that low, it does not belong in the company of the Carver, Carson, or Vonnegut 3's.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 9, 2021
Non so se mettere 3 o 4 stelle, quindi è probabile che in futuro cambi la mia valutazione.
È il primo libro di un autore nigeriano che leggo, non so quindi se lo stile di Tutuola sia tipico della zona, oppure se è una particolarità specifica di questo scrittore.
A quanto leggo in una nota della traduttrice, che afferma di aver cercato di restare il più possibile fedele alle peculiarità dell'originale, la lingua adottata da Tutuola è "l'inglese come come si parla in Nigeria (etnia yoruba, nella specie) che non di rado trascura, o almeno altera, grammatica, sintassi, articolazioni e nessi, in particolare per quello che riguarda l'uso delle congiunzioni, preposizioni e avverbi".
A tratti mi ha preso parecchio (in poche occasioni), e per lunghi tratti mi ha annoiato, ma non al punto da spingermi a desistere.
"La mia vita nel bosco degli spiriti" è preceduto da "Il bevitore di vino di palma"; proprio questa prima parte è quella che mi ha colpito maggiormente e per cui penso possa valere la pena avvicinarsi a questo volume.
Nonostante i racconti seguano una linea cronologica ben definita, in varie occasioni si scorgono elementi poco verosimili, forse allegorici. Anche se, ancor più probabilmente, lo scopo dell'autore non era tanto quello di narrare due storie verosimili, quanto quello di rappresentare a livello sensibile ed emozionale ciò che il folklore yoruba l'ha portato a sperimentare.
È il primo libro di un autore nigeriano che leggo, non so quindi se lo stile di Tutuola sia tipico della zona, oppure se è una particolarità specifica di questo scrittore.
A quanto leggo in una nota della traduttrice, che afferma di aver cercato di restare il più possibile fedele alle peculiarità dell'originale, la lingua adottata da Tutuola è "l'inglese come come si parla in Nigeria (etnia yoruba, nella specie) che non di rado trascura, o almeno altera, grammatica, sintassi, articolazioni e nessi, in particolare per quello che riguarda l'uso delle congiunzioni, preposizioni e avverbi".
A tratti mi ha preso parecchio (in poche occasioni), e per lunghi tratti mi ha annoiato, ma non al punto da spingermi a desistere.
"La mia vita nel bosco degli spiriti" è preceduto da "Il bevitore di vino di palma"; proprio questa prima parte è quella che mi ha colpito maggiormente e per cui penso possa valere la pena avvicinarsi a questo volume.
Nonostante i racconti seguano una linea cronologica ben definita, in varie occasioni si scorgono elementi poco verosimili, forse allegorici. Anche se, ancor più probabilmente, lo scopo dell'autore non era tanto quello di narrare due storie verosimili, quanto quello di rappresentare a livello sensibile ed emozionale ciò che il folklore yoruba l'ha portato a sperimentare.
November 24, 2017
I came across this book via the Brian Eno/David Byrne record. I always loved the title of that album and didn't know they had scooped it from a book (that apparently they hadn't read before).
This book is essentially a set of hallucinatory short stories, woven together as a travel log. Think of Alice in Wonderland, but even more out-there and nightmarish. It even has little of bit of 1984 dystopian feel, although in an entirely different "ghost" context. I am glad to have been exposed to this...and read until p.92. However, at that point, the concept had played itself out for me and I was no longer interested in completing the book.
I recommend reading any of the chapters for a taste of something entirely different. I would have preferred a single short story.
This book is essentially a set of hallucinatory short stories, woven together as a travel log. Think of Alice in Wonderland, but even more out-there and nightmarish. It even has little of bit of 1984 dystopian feel, although in an entirely different "ghost" context. I am glad to have been exposed to this...and read until p.92. However, at that point, the concept had played itself out for me and I was no longer interested in completing the book.
I recommend reading any of the chapters for a taste of something entirely different. I would have preferred a single short story.
May 5, 2019
This reminded me a lot of Native traditional quest stories like Ayaash and Blod Clot Boy. Someone else on here compared it to Miyazaki which I also can definitely see. The prose is not my favorite but it’s very in the style of folk tales, fables, quest stories, however you want to call them. The only character who gets much personality is the narrator but he seems like a pretty funny dude—trickstery, kind of.
June 14, 2023
Completely crazy and surrealistic but extremely funny and entertaining. I read it looking for some sort of broken English, for the appropriation of the colonizer's language by an African writer, and found an amazing quest story, a mad voyage. If there is no comic book adaptation of this work, there should be one, somebody should put these characters into images!
June 5, 2020
Amos Tutuola è il primo autore nigeriano a varcare i confini del suo paese con il primo romanzo Il bevitore di vino di palma pubblicato nel 1952 da una casa editrice inglese a cui seguirà La mia vita nel bosco degli spiriti.
Nei due racconti c'è tutta la cultura folkloristica dell'Africa Occidentale tramandata oralmente da chi era capace di attirare l'attenzione delle masse con le storie più strambe e inimmaginabili, dove la fantasia senza inibizioni e l'umorismo sono i pilastri di una trama letteraria semplice, veloce e divertente. Le storie sono avvolte e permeate dalla mentalità tribale, fatta di superstizioni, pratiche magiche, creature orribili, streghe, luoghi demoniaci. Insieme ai protagonisti veniamo sbattuti qua e la, da un posto fantasmagorico all'altro, immaginiamo con occhi strabiliati quando leggiamo delle miracolose trasformazioni in animali o oggetti che quei poveri personaggi devono subire, come ostacoli da affrontare nel loro cammino, per poi, grazie a coincidenze insolite, riuscire a mettersi in salvo. Ma solo per pochi attimi, prima di ricadere preda del prossimo incantesimo che li attende dietro l'angolo. Due storie che sono anche viaggi iniziatici. Tutuola amava leggere i libri di mitologia greca. Infatti nel primo libro è facile scorgere il collegamento con Ulisse che viaggia negli inferi alla ricerca dell'indovino Tiresia. Il secondo testo, dopo le peripezia di una vita prima di ritrovare la strada verso casa, è senza dubbio collegato anch'esso con la storia dell'Odissea. Che dire quindi? I miti si accomunano sotto una stessa bandiera che è quella dell'umanità. A ogni popolo spetta il compito di crearli secondo la propria coscienza collettiva. Amos Tutuola con questi racconti ha delineato così la mitologia cosmica della sua Africa.
Nei due racconti c'è tutta la cultura folkloristica dell'Africa Occidentale tramandata oralmente da chi era capace di attirare l'attenzione delle masse con le storie più strambe e inimmaginabili, dove la fantasia senza inibizioni e l'umorismo sono i pilastri di una trama letteraria semplice, veloce e divertente. Le storie sono avvolte e permeate dalla mentalità tribale, fatta di superstizioni, pratiche magiche, creature orribili, streghe, luoghi demoniaci. Insieme ai protagonisti veniamo sbattuti qua e la, da un posto fantasmagorico all'altro, immaginiamo con occhi strabiliati quando leggiamo delle miracolose trasformazioni in animali o oggetti che quei poveri personaggi devono subire, come ostacoli da affrontare nel loro cammino, per poi, grazie a coincidenze insolite, riuscire a mettersi in salvo. Ma solo per pochi attimi, prima di ricadere preda del prossimo incantesimo che li attende dietro l'angolo. Due storie che sono anche viaggi iniziatici. Tutuola amava leggere i libri di mitologia greca. Infatti nel primo libro è facile scorgere il collegamento con Ulisse che viaggia negli inferi alla ricerca dell'indovino Tiresia. Il secondo testo, dopo le peripezia di una vita prima di ritrovare la strada verso casa, è senza dubbio collegato anch'esso con la storia dell'Odissea. Che dire quindi? I miti si accomunano sotto una stessa bandiera che è quella dell'umanità. A ogni popolo spetta il compito di crearli secondo la propria coscienza collettiva. Amos Tutuola con questi racconti ha delineato così la mitologia cosmica della sua Africa.
December 18, 2020
Built on Yoruba folktales and oral traditions, these stories don’t really read like “fantasy” but I agree with an argument that sees traditional stories as influential early fantasy precursors, although worth noting that they are stories that represent real supernatural beliefs in a way that modern “fantasy” mostly does not.
The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town follows the first person account of a man who sets out on a quest through mortal and spiritual realms to find his deceased palm-wine tapster. He calls himself “Father of gods who could do everything in the world,” and he’s tested by those he meets on his journey to live up to this name. He must outwit those who seek to harm him, and perform various tasks set forth by those who he hopes will give him information about his tapster’s location in return. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a similarly wild adventurous story, another first person narration about a young boy who is driven into the Bush of Ghosts and spends many years being captured by various ghosts and traveling between ghost towns unable to find his way out. Each ghost and town is different and he struggles to navigate an ever-changing set of unknown new rules.
These whimsical, never-straightforward stories captivated and entertained me. I marveled, I laughed, I turned another page and now I can’t stop thinking about these two adventures, their many strange settings and characters, and Tutuola’s distinctive voice. Honestly, what a treasure.
The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town follows the first person account of a man who sets out on a quest through mortal and spiritual realms to find his deceased palm-wine tapster. He calls himself “Father of gods who could do everything in the world,” and he’s tested by those he meets on his journey to live up to this name. He must outwit those who seek to harm him, and perform various tasks set forth by those who he hopes will give him information about his tapster’s location in return. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a similarly wild adventurous story, another first person narration about a young boy who is driven into the Bush of Ghosts and spends many years being captured by various ghosts and traveling between ghost towns unable to find his way out. Each ghost and town is different and he struggles to navigate an ever-changing set of unknown new rules.
These whimsical, never-straightforward stories captivated and entertained me. I marveled, I laughed, I turned another page and now I can’t stop thinking about these two adventures, their many strange settings and characters, and Tutuola’s distinctive voice. Honestly, what a treasure.
November 17, 2017
Il bevitore di vino di palma e La mia vita nel bosco degli spiriti, tra i primi esempi della letteratura di quella che diventerà la Nigeria, mescolano miti e racconti ispirati dalla cultura orale yoruba, il cristianesimo dell'Autore e l'universale tema della "ricerca della felicità". Nello specifico, la ricerca dello spillatore di vino di palma necessario alla felicità dello sventurato bevitore, e la ricerca della patria ( e della famiglia ) perduta da parte del bambino finito nel Bosco degli Spiriti per sfuggire ad uno dei "molti tipi di guerre africane".
Libri ricchissimi, prodotti per accumulazione di avvenimenti sempre più incredibili e iperbolici, danno l'opportunità di entrare in contatto con una cultura affascinante, lontana da quella europea/occidentale, ma con punti di contatto non indifferenti ( lo stesso vale per la cultura orientale: a tratti mi è venuto in mente Il viaggio in Occidente attribuito a Wú Chéng'ēn ).
Libri ricchissimi, prodotti per accumulazione di avvenimenti sempre più incredibili e iperbolici, danno l'opportunità di entrare in contatto con una cultura affascinante, lontana da quella europea/occidentale, ma con punti di contatto non indifferenti ( lo stesso vale per la cultura orientale: a tratti mi è venuto in mente Il viaggio in Occidente attribuito a Wú Chéng'ēn ).
January 11, 2010
This is just simply a classic. Despite the pidgin English and syntax errors left intact (there was some "cleaning up" done by an English editor), the pure spirit of these books come through beautifully as Tutuola takes Nigerian folk tales and sets them into a linked narrative all his own. Harsh reality coexists alongside complete fantasy, and the two become intertwined with no possibility of disentanglement. Much of Tutuola's work reads as the fantastic stories a child might tell of monsters, journeys, shapeshifting, etc. But there is something completely unique about his style and approach and these books occupy a place all their own in the canon of literature from any culture, any timeframe.
December 27, 2019
Racconti di formazione intrisi di fantasia. Non so quanto sia dovuto al folklore nigeriano (che mi è sconosciuto) e quanto all'inventiva dell'autore, ma mi sono sentita catapultata in un mondo strano, inesplorato e allucinato. Il protagonista riesce a barcamenarsi tramite trovate ingegnose usando i suoi amuleti magici. Le creture che si incontrano sono bizzarre, spesso inquietanti, non sempre benevole e non mancano parti molto cruente. Lo stile è semplice e colloquiale, volutamente sgrammaticato a tratti; sembra di stare ascoltando un amico che racconta fiabe avventurose e non si sa quanto sia vero e quanto inventato, ma ci piace credere a tutto.
8.5/10
8.5/10
March 15, 2008
What a strange, strange, wonderful "novel" this is. Big Amos Tutola takes the oral storytelling traditions of the Nigeria he grew up in and casts them in a more western form--it looks like a novel, kind of reads like a novel--but it is like nothing else you've ever read. It's more like a fever dream in which cause and effect seem to have gone out the window, save that everything here is rooted in reason, ultimately ... just a sort of reason that is tough to get one's head around. (Am I making sense? Probably not. Hell of a strange book, though. And fun.)
April 3, 2011
(i only read the palm-wine drinkard, not my life in the bush of ghosts.) the unstructured, repetitive, rambling narrative was hard for me to get through after the first 50 pages or so, but it was still an interesting and at times really funny read.
March 28, 2017
So I only read the Palm-Wine Drinkard and the title is appropriate considering how much this felt like a drunk person telling about their dreams. However, there is a lot of interesting imagery, even if it's hard to latch onto any sort of narrative. An odd story, but thankfully fairly short.
November 7, 2007
I only remember liking this book a lot, even though every other page there was some sentence that I had to read a thousand times in a row because the syntax was just so bizarre.
October 4, 2008
Crazy little thing like quasi-surrealist tribal postcolonialism. Mmm hmmm.
October 29, 2015
5 stars for Bush of Ghosts. Meh for the Drinkard.
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April 30, 2025This is one of those books that led me down an absolute rabbit hole of follow-up googling. It’s a very reasonable response. Since the turn of the 1950s people have been finishing My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and The Palm-Wine Drinkard in a fit of delight, going, “What the heck did I just read?” Nobody knows. Not even Amos Tutuola, the man, the myth, the legend.
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is an episodic fever dream of crazy ghost encounters, usually disgusting and uncomfortable. Putting the narrator in physical pain, deprivation, and discomfort is a lot of the plot. The tone is hard to clock–at times I think the narrator’s misery is being played for laughs, a Stooges-like physical comedy, and at other times for pathos. But there are some truly wild things in here. I love the chapter exclusively about ghost haircuts (“Barbing Day in the Town of Short Ghosts”–all the chapter titles are absolutely inspired). I might even recommend this for older kids, although my sensibilities are probably not parent-level dependable. I’m just sayin, it’s no weirder or more violent than Lord of the Rings and other nonsense given to me in middle school.
Every culture of the world has something that translates to English as “ghost”, and every culture has slightly different ideas about exactly what they are, how they behave, where they reside and how they spend their non-lives. I have no exact sense of how the Yoruba define ghosts, but in these stories there is often confusion about whether someone is alive or dead, ghost or spirit or earthly person. The palm-wine drinkard’s wife asks of the woman from the Red Bush, “This is not a human-being and she is not a spirit, but what is she?” and the answer almost doesn’t matter, because all these entities can be friendly or threatening or false, and all can have power of various kinds. I like that permeability in this world, a confusion about boundaries that feels familiar.
Certain questions float to the surface while I’m reading: Did a publisher of the 1950s really agree to publish something by an Indigenous writer in non-standard English, without apocalyptic editing? [Apparently yes, sort of. Induced by a strange mixture of exoticism and natural delight in the text. With some editing.] Did Tutuola ever benefit very materially from his books? [Apparently yes, sort of. Others helped do battle with his publishers over shoddy royalty deals. Near the end of his life, he was making his living as a farmer and told another Nigerian writer in an interview that he had the same interest in both writing and farming.] Some people say these novellas are of course magical realism, and then Ato Quayson says with great authority that they are not. Tutuola was a modernist, or a folklorist, or both, or neither. But my overwhelming impression is of his energy as a writer and as a person. He was indefatigable. He wasn’t fussed. He always loved storytelling. He liked to write, and he liked seeing people respond, and seemed to feel himself amply rewarded by his life. More than a century after his birth, I still don’t think we’ve learned how to support and care for blue-collar talent like that. I wonder what it would take.
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is an episodic fever dream of crazy ghost encounters, usually disgusting and uncomfortable. Putting the narrator in physical pain, deprivation, and discomfort is a lot of the plot. The tone is hard to clock–at times I think the narrator’s misery is being played for laughs, a Stooges-like physical comedy, and at other times for pathos. But there are some truly wild things in here. I love the chapter exclusively about ghost haircuts (“Barbing Day in the Town of Short Ghosts”–all the chapter titles are absolutely inspired). I might even recommend this for older kids, although my sensibilities are probably not parent-level dependable. I’m just sayin, it’s no weirder or more violent than Lord of the Rings and other nonsense given to me in middle school.
Every culture of the world has something that translates to English as “ghost”, and every culture has slightly different ideas about exactly what they are, how they behave, where they reside and how they spend their non-lives. I have no exact sense of how the Yoruba define ghosts, but in these stories there is often confusion about whether someone is alive or dead, ghost or spirit or earthly person. The palm-wine drinkard’s wife asks of the woman from the Red Bush, “This is not a human-being and she is not a spirit, but what is she?” and the answer almost doesn’t matter, because all these entities can be friendly or threatening or false, and all can have power of various kinds. I like that permeability in this world, a confusion about boundaries that feels familiar.
Certain questions float to the surface while I’m reading: Did a publisher of the 1950s really agree to publish something by an Indigenous writer in non-standard English, without apocalyptic editing? [Apparently yes, sort of. Induced by a strange mixture of exoticism and natural delight in the text. With some editing.] Did Tutuola ever benefit very materially from his books? [Apparently yes, sort of. Others helped do battle with his publishers over shoddy royalty deals. Near the end of his life, he was making his living as a farmer and told another Nigerian writer in an interview that he had the same interest in both writing and farming.] Some people say these novellas are of course magical realism, and then Ato Quayson says with great authority that they are not. Tutuola was a modernist, or a folklorist, or both, or neither. But my overwhelming impression is of his energy as a writer and as a person. He was indefatigable. He wasn’t fussed. He always loved storytelling. He liked to write, and he liked seeing people respond, and seemed to feel himself amply rewarded by his life. More than a century after his birth, I still don’t think we’ve learned how to support and care for blue-collar talent like that. I wonder what it would take.
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