Law #8 - When the supernatural meets the mundane
“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.”
I have been asked four questions today.
Do you rest well enough?
Do you have dreams?
Do you have insomnia?
What’s your relationship with the daily morning alarm?
My answers were fairly clear:
Yes, ever since I have changed jobs.
Yes.
Less often than I had before I changed jobs, almost non-existent now.
No relationship, since I no longer have an alarm. I work remotely and have flexible hours, therefore I wake up like a wizard. Precisely when I mean to.
A few months ago, this was all but a dream. Even though I worked in a hybrid manner, partially remote, nothing was flexible and I couldn’t imagine things could get better anytime soon. But this happened, and they did. And even though I make less than I made back then, I think I found a form of happiness. I am content.
In a way, the supernatural (something I could only imagine before, and didn’t think possible) met the mundane (it became something my life is right now).
One of the advantages of having flexible hours and no more overtime is that I get to read more than I did (which was close to nothing back then).
Today I am going to talk about the first book I read in 2024, a year in which I plan to read at least one book from every continent (author, plot, or both). The first book is related to Africa.
Winner of the Man Booker prize in 1991, ”The Famished Road”, by Nigerian writer Ben Okri (the youngest ever to win the prize, at 32 years of age) is the story of a boy that refused to die and was constantly hunted by spirits to get him to their world. He is what is called an abiku, a spirit-child.
The biggest and most relevant element of this book is how the story is told. Upon reading it, I can tell it reads in a similar way as “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, by Gabriel García Márquez. It’s the same fast-paced descriptive manner used there and the strangest thing is that if I go back to my review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, I can find the following fragment, which applies here as well:
For me, first and foremost, it was special because of the storytelling. The way he tells the story. It's different than a regular novel, in the sense that dialogue is minimal and the action is all presented through the method of effectively talking about it. It's basically "that character went there, and did that, and thought about that, and then did this other thing, et caetera, et caetera" instead of, "that character said "Hey, I'm going there", and then "hey, I did that. I wonder what it means."" and so on and so forth. Gabriel García Márquez writes like he documents events, instead of presenting them, like writers usually do.
I later found out (while writing this review) that I’m not the only one seeing similarities between Ben Okri and Gabriel García Márquez, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out the same thing in his article in New York Times on June 28th, 1992.
Ben Okri’s novel is a little bit different though, in that it intertwines the supernatural with the mundane. It does so to the point that it presents supernatural events in a mundane manner and mundane events in a supernatural manner. At many points, it’s even hard to tell if the things happening are mundane or supernatural, if Azaro, the abiku child, is among spirits or people, or if the people he is speaking with are people or spirits. It seems everybody has at least some connection to the spirit world, and it’s pretty difficult to tell them from each other.
There is one other important thing that is very different from “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. The descriptions tend to become boring after the first couple hundred pages, as unlike Gabriel García Márquez, Ben Okri likes to present action in the smallest paragraphs, while heavily describing stuff in the largest ones. And he has some of the largest paragraphs I have seen in a book ever, some of them span as long as three pages.
Even though I found later on (after I started reading it) that it is part of a trilogy, I am not sure if I am prepared to read all of it for this very reason. At some point, it became painful to follow. I’m not saying it wasn’t dynamic – it was. But there are too many descriptions, a trap in which many writers fall very often.
Nevertheless, it is probably the most complex work I have read by an African author, and I think he fully deserved that prize. It was an ambitious feat, to say the least, and its uniqueness is what makes it special.
Read it if you have liked “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, but do not go in with the same expectations.
“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.” - Ben Okri