Stars of the New Curfew [Paperback]

Ben Okri (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2010

This collection of short stories is set in Nigeria and reflects the mad, exotic and often dangerous chaos which reigns there. They include jumbled up voodoo stories, stories of shanty towns and of men from the villages seeking their fortunes in the streets and filthy gutters of the new towns.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The central theme in this "brilliant" collection of African short stories is the difficulty of standing one's ground in a world where superstition, poverty and irresponsible use of power combine to destroy effective social bonds. "Okri writes beautiful, dense prose. He is a modernist author, moving freely from realism to surrealism, but his work is consistently accessible," stated PW.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Born in Nigeria, Okri portrays in these stories an Africa cast adrift from its traditional values and prey to greed and violence. The narrator of "Worlds That Flourish" travels through a war-torn country (Nigeria during the Biafran revolt?) to visit the land of the dead. The down-and-out characters of "In the City of Red Dust" sell their blood to survive; meanwhile, the city erupts in celebration of the military governor's birthday. Best is the title story, about a patent medicine salesman who learns that the real madness is not in his nightmares but in the life around him. Even here, however, the reader feels little involvement in the characters' dilemmas and little interest in their fate. Okri's Africa is phantasmagoric but unmoving.
- Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Vintage Books (April 27, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0099283883
• ISBN-13: 978-0099283881
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.5 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #929,092 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "When chaos is the god of an era.....", October 31, 2002

By 

Robert S. Newman "Bob Newman" (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stars of the New Curfew (Hardcover)

If we except the first story, "In the Shadow of War", which seemed slight and unworthy of the rest, STARS OF THE NEW CURFEW contains five topnotch stories by Nigerian author Ben Okri. To use a `national' adjective like that is sometimes to say everything and sometimes to say nothing. In this case, it is obvious that though you can take Okri out of Nigeria (he lives in London), you cannot take Nigeria out of Okri. The gritty, sweaty, illogical desperation of his characters, hanging on to life by hook or by crook in the slums of Lagos or provincial towns, is so vivid that so-called "magical realism" seems more like "realism". The smell of sewerage and dried fish, the clash of traffic, drums and trumpets, the spieling of patent medicine salesmen, the dust, the heaps of garbage, the roar of military trucks and aircraft drown out your disbelief. Okri is the Tutuola of the modern age, a more controlled, a more polished Yoruba tale spinner with none of the hopes of the more-placid colonial era when independence was only a goal. Published after 28 years of freedom, these stories reflect the chaos, the corruption, the lost chances and the waste of human abilities and natural resources. Maybe they are just stories, maybe they are a protest from the soul---what has happened to our Nigeria ? The military governor's birthday where one of the crazily zooming planes celebrating the occasion crashes into a slum----the competition of two wealthy families in a small town which takes the form of a money-throwing contest in which poor and unlucky fellow citizens abase themselves by fighting over notes and coins---the irony of a bewildered Rastafarian from the long-vanished diaspora, returned to preach and cry out "Africa, we counting on yuh !" in the streets of chaos and ruin. People live on their wits, people live at the expense of others' health and earnings, violence rules, the beautiful girl will die, life is cheap, yet dearly held for all that. The last story, "What the Tapster Saw", ripped from the same cloth as Tutuola's "The Palm-wine Drinkard", is a tale as told by the traditionally powerless to deliver subtle messages about affairs in the real world without pointing any fingers. It can be a message for Nigeria, it can be just the fantastic wanderings of a storyteller's fevered brain. These are wonderful stories, Okri is a worthy addition to the pantheon of Nigerian literature. "There are several ways to burn in your own fire."(p.191) Here they are.

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't blink or you'll miss something..., February 25, 2000

By 

boeanthropist "Philip Welsh" (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stars of the New Curfew (Mass Market Paperback)

As strange as a dream in which one is eaten alive by fire-ants and yet somehow allthewhile conscious thereof, of one's own diffusion and dispersal down those thousands of tiny red gullets... Reference points are Amos Tutuola, definitely, the jerking sudden announced transformatives of the folklore of the Yoruba, et al (I have no idea to which African tribe Okri can trace his own origins), and more modern explorers of the amorphous boundaries between civilization and the wilderness -- between Nature's grunting Id and Society's gilt-edged Superego -- like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bruno Schulz, Jorge Luis Borges, John Crowley, Russell Hoban, Isabel Allende, Jamaica Kincaid's "At the Bottom of ther River", Danilo Kis, etc., plus Aime Cesaire and his fellow "Negritude" poets. It is the shifting, blinking, writhing non-linearity of African culture distilled into 20th century English, rife with the governments which make even their modern Italian counterparts seem stable by comparison. I don't have the book next to me at the moment -- as usual, someone borrowed it and never returned it -- but it's half-dozen stories are a wonder of nightmare-logic and tableau-instability-complexes, in vibrant equatorial polytones, especially the one about the men who sell their blood... Hope he keeps it up.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Elusive, February 4, 2001

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stars of the New Curfew (Mass Market Paperback)

So, here are six short stories from one of Nigeria's preeminent modern writers. Okri writes in English, so one is fortunate not to have to read through the skein of translation. However, at the end of each story, I kept wishing that I had read this for a class, or my book group, so there was someone to discuss the symbolism and meaning in each tale. Set in Lagos, and in smaller villages, the stories often veer off into the unexplained (which is so frequently and unwisely labeled as "magical realism"), in ways that left me somewhat frustrated. The stories are decently written, but one gets the feeling that the meaning is more important, and for me, the meaning was somewhat elusive.