The Palm-Wine Drinkard and 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.

Customer Reviews:

Highly recommended!

By Andrew M. Schirmer "violist/student" - October 6, 2002

Fairy-tales? Hah! See if your kid will go to sleep after hearing one of Tutuola's mad hallucinatory (not my word) yarns. A seldom-discussed aspect of cultural anthropology is the metamorphosis of our fairy-tales--the imaginative currency of early youth which are passed on through family and social structures alike. In America, characters like witches, ghosts, and other creatures have their genesis in Europe, or can be traced even further back to ancient Indo-European cultures (of course, we have our own indigenous tales as well). These characters and stories have become so diluted over the years, that they've lost a lot of their original cultural meaning or relevance. What does this have to do with Amos Tutuola? "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" and "The Palm Wine Drinkard" are African tales in their pure unadulterated form. And they're not something you'd want to hear before bedtime! Amos Tutuola writes an English which lends the narration a wide-eyed,... read more

How can it even be approached?

By Cornelius - May 1, 2000

What an experience. Accompanying the narrator, "Father of the gods who can do everything in this world," the reader escapes the difference between real or unreal, into where the two are the same. A book like none other i've ever come near, and i am not sure what i'd do if i did. There is no explanation, no need, just a story: creatures, trees, an alive bush, walking backward deads, menacing babies - one of which explodes from a thumb, trees within which lives "Faithful mother" who is faithful to all things - alive and dead, an egg that grants all wishes, much dancing, much music... So many things. This book is required reading for especially this, but every other, generation, for all "races" of folks, a book for which there can be no substitute. Purchase it, check out your local library, whatever, just read it. Then reread it.

The voice of the Yoruba people...

By A Customer - December 12, 1997

Amos Tutuola died earlier this year (June), when he died he was one of the most appreciated authors of the African continent. At first he was not accepted by the African intellectualist community because his work was considered to confirm the prejudices of African literature as primitive. This book was first printed in 1952 by the english publisher 'Faber and Faber' and have with a few exceptions never been out of print since then, Dylan Thomas wrote a delighted review of the book and called the language Tutuola wrote in "young english", for Tutuola did not write in his native tounge, Yoruba, but in a very primitive form of english. Tutuola barely had any education and he has been accused of only writing down the myths and folklores of the Yoruba people, though he never claimed he made up all these stories himself. Into the tale of the Palmwinedrinkard he's woven a lot of the Yoruba folktales, these are new myths for the people of the west, which means that the stories he... read more