Stars of the New Curfew
by Ben Okri
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To enter the world of Ben Okri's stories is to surrender to a new reality. Set in the chaotic streets of Lagos and the jungle heart of Nigeria, all the laws of cause and effect, fact and fiction, are suspended. It is a world where the lives of the powerless veer terrifyingly close to nightmare. In rich, lyrical, almost hallucinatory prose Ben Okri guides us through the fabulous and the mundane, the serene and the randomly violent. The unrelenting Nigerian heat and the implacable darkness of show more the black-out and the military curfew are the backdrops for this characters each finding their own ways to survive. We witness their dogged resistance to impotence, their unquenchable humour and their insistence on the possibility of love in the face of terror. Written with the lucid clarity and logic of dream, STARS OF THE NEW CURFEW is a book of visionary imagination. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
This collection of stories reminds me of nothing so much as the classic by D.O. Fagunwa, also of Nigeria, Forest of a Thousand Daemons. I don’t think that these stories have the imagination or power of Fagunwa’s novel—which I parenthetically urge you to read; it’s brilliant—but they do share an emphasis on phantasmagoria drawn from local mythologies. The stories largely deal with the newly independent Nigeria as it falls prey to greed and violence and its ties to its history and traditional values begin to disintegrate. A promising work and I look forward to my next work by him.
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Author Information
51+ Works 5,212 Members
Ben Okri, 1959 - Nigerian novelist, Ben Okri was born in Minna. After his birth, his family moved to England so his father could study law. At the age of seven, his family returned to Nigeria and his father practiced in Lagos. His childhood was influenced by the Nigerian civil war. He was constantly being withdrawn from schools so most of his show more education was at home. After failing to be placed in a university, Okri began writing articles on social and political issues. Most of them were not published, but he began writing short stories based on these articles and they began finding their way into women's journals and evening papers. In 1978, he moved back to England where he studied comparative literature at Essex University but was forced to leave without a degree because of a lack of funds. He was a poetry editor of West Africa and worked also for the BBC. At nineteen, he finished his first novel "Flowers and Shadows" and it was published in 1980. The story attacked corruption in newly independent Nigeria and tells of a successful businessman whose jealous relatives make his life difficult. Okri's second novel, "The Landscapes Within" (1981), traces the adventures of a young, poor painter in Lagos. This novel was followed by two collections of short stories, "Incidents at the Shrine" (1986), and "Starts of the New Curfew" (1988). Several of the stories tell of the Biafran War from a child's eyes. The novel "The Famished Road" (1991) tells the story of a character who must choose between the pain of mortality and the land of the spirits. Okri's next novel, "Songs of Enchantment" (1993), continued with the mythical and poetical view of the world. "An African Elegy" (1992), is a collection of poems with classical themes. Okri has won several awards, which include the Booker Prize (1991), the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa (1987), the Paris Review Aga Khan prize for fiction, the Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize, and the Premio Grinzane Cavour. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Work Relationships
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1988
- Important places
- Lagos, Nigeria
- Epigraph
- We carry in our worlds that flourish
our worlds that have failed
Christopher Okigbo - First words
- That afternoon three soldiers came to the village. They scattered the goats and chickens. They went to the palm-frond bar and ordered a calabash of palm-wine. They drank amidst the flies.
- Blurbers
- Woke Soyinka
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- Members
- 163
- Popularity
- 201,393
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.46)
- Languages
- Czech, Dutch, English, French
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 9
- ASINs
- 2
