Customer Reviews

The Interpreters (African Writers Series, 76)

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"The Interpreters" are a group of Nigerian intellectuals who have traveled outside their home country and who have returned to confront and understand the gods of their ancestors, the government of their country, and their own fates. The book reminded me of some of my favorite "anarchic" novels of the '50s and '60s-"Lucky Jim," "The End of the Road," even "The Crying of Lot 49." Sagoe, the journalist character, has a fascinating and scatalogical philosophy of life that parodies French existentialism very cleverly. The other characters include a frustrated engineer who becomes a great sculptor, a painter hard at work throughout the narrative on an epic canvas depicting all the main characters as versions of the gods of Yorubaland, and an eccentric white Englishwoman who has married an unsuitable Nigerian bureaucrat and befriended his more liberal mother. The book works on several levels--as farce, as cultural critique of colonialism, and as an exploration of the ongoing legacy of the Yoruba gods who animate and obsess the interpreters. Most importantly, it is an entertaining and unpredictable story full of sharp insights and surprises.

This is to correct the "educated" reviewer who claimed Wole soyinka won the Nobel Prize for "The Interpreters". Soyinka wrote this novelvery very early in his carreer. According to the citation, Soyinkas's Nobel Prize was for his plays, of which "Death and the King's Horseman" is arguably one of the best plays of the 20th century. The "I lived in Africa for 10 years" reviewer never read the play in his/her 10 years in the country called Africa!

It took countless attempts and a few really long flights to finish this drivel. There is nothing in this book that should save it from recycling. Pity, a good tree was killed to print it. I wondered how on Earth it could get the Nobel Prize... And then I saw that Wole Soyinka was the first African author to receive it. And it was his first novel. That explains! The old f.rts from the Novel Committee chose an unknown author, made sure he is black and from Africa, and gave him the prize. You say it can't be? Why not? Obama got nominated for the Nobel after only 20 days in the office. What's the difference?

As for the novel itself: the language is difficult and mostly annoying; characters are short-tempered loons with unpredictable and illogical behaviours; the story line is absent and is rather a hodge-podge of some unrelated and badly writen events. After turning the last page you ask yourself: what was the pont of all that? The only idea that is clearly defined is that whites are bad. Everything about whites in the book is bad. One of the main characters is simply a black chauvinist. The black professor is ridiculed and insulted only because he has European manners. The only "positive" white character is good because she tries to be black by being rude and arrogant. Do you think there is a moral to all this? Think again.

And to all those voices of "indignation" that will accuse me of not knowing the African culture... Actually, I lived in Africa for 10 years and was a citizen of an African country. So, I know. It is those with ".edu" extension on their e-mails who don't.