Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind

Books have a metaphorical life of their own. They speak of another time and another space, forming such mental imageries as if you were being transported through time into that world. What if one day those metaphors were to actually engulf your life such that you dedicate yourself to excavate the bizarre truths and probably save the lives of its characters?

Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind is an extraordinary work of fiction where, what begins as a literary curiosity for young Daniel Sampere in owning the only copy of a rather unheard book, turns into an adventure of life and death, and of saving his loved ones. Carlos’ literary fervor is evident even in the first page of the book, when Daniel’s father introduces him – then only ten years – to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books – a mammoth labyrinthine of crammed and dusty aisles full of centuries-old forgotten books. As is the tradition, Daniel must choose and adopt a book and make it a part of his life.

I was raised among books making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

Daniel chooses The Shadow of the Wind, written by an unknown author named Julian Carax and becomes so engrossed with the fascinating novel that he wants to read other works by Carax, only to realize that no other copy of any book by Carax exists anymore. Daniel, with his friend Fermin, tries to get behind the mystery and learns rumors of a dark faceless guy buying Carax’s books and burning them – his final target would be the copy with Daniel. The faceless guy calls himself Lain Coubert – which is the name of the devil in “The Shadow of the Wind”.

A reef of clouds and lightning raced across the skies from the sea… the stranger turned around and walked off towards the docks, a shape melting into the shadows, cocooned in his hollow laughter.

The story is set in the decades during and after the Second World War in Spain, so we are spared of the internet and electronics gadgets in favor of a refreshing little Spanish town where people still walk long distances to work and talk street politics in groups as the sun goes down for the day. Daniel’s attempts to learn about Carax leads him to many encounters. He finds love, estranges his best friend, and discovers startling facts about the past of his neighborhood. Love and its loss are at the roots of everything that happens in the novel; and at one point Daniel realizes his own life roughly resembling that of Carax.

Carlos’ narration is exemplary, to say the least. And Lucia Graves has done a remarkable job of translating the Spanish original into English without losing any of the literary beauty or the Spanish flavor. Bits of subtle humor, vernacular jokes, and minor elements of symbolism and political satire are interspersed all over the novel giving a periodic momentary relief amidst the otherwise gripping pages. At one point he describes a preacher,

Years of teaching had left him with that firm and didactic tone of someone used to being heard, but not certain of being listened to.

The characters are strongly formed and memorable. Even the minor ones have an important role to play at various points in the novel. In a novel of such breadth and subplots, it’s easy for one to get lost in the number of new characters and their complicated relationships. Carlos has managed the multitude characters and their relative significance in the context of the story quite commendably.

The Shadow of the Wind was thoroughly enjoyable. There are no superfluous subplots or irrelevant characters, and the momentum never slows down. And yes, it’s a literary delight!

The God Delusion

Picked it up at Crossword last weekend. A couple of days back a colleague noticed the book in my hand and out of that intestine-wobbling curiosity that lies bundled inside every avid reader, he grabbed it and read the title. ‘Oh Man, how can you call it like this. This is ridiculous, this terming it a delusion’, he squabbled nervously and meekly handed the book back to me.

He had written off the book even before trying to know what is written in it. And this is precisely what Richard Dawkins calls as delusion in the book.

The metaphorical or pantheistic God… is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language.

And also quotes the ever-effervescent Douglas Adams, on how humans are being discouraged from questioning any form of religious dogmatism.

Here’s an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!

I’m still reading the book, and for all I can say – I’m enjoying it. As Jax noted in his review,

Irrespective of your religious belief, I think this is a great stimulating book that every person ought to read. I absolutely loved it.

Agree completely. If one thinks it blasphemy to open his mind to such objective and true thoughts as propounded in the book, then he’s exactly the person Dawkins is targeting – the one hallucinating with the God delusion.

L’affaire Life, Fiction and the Monsoon

The monsoon rain is dashing outside in this late night hour, as I sit beside a thick volume of The Shadow of the Wind turned to page 143 and gazing at the line I just finished reading.

Everything on that page spoke of another time: the strokes that depended on the ink-pot, the words scratched on the thick paper by the tip of the nib, the rugged feel of the paper.

Much like what the lines of fiction do to me – speak of another time and another space, forming such mental imageries as if you were being transported through time into that world – the world that fiction is made of. And every time I raise my head from the tinted pages of a book, I feel suddenly ejected from the hallucination of those imageries into the blinding pace of the real world.

Fiction tends to touch you, at times in strange ways. There are times when I’m surprised how much a character resembles me in his thoughts, as if I were actually him. Like Yambo (the protagonist in Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana) did.

It was one such monsoon morning, many years back. I was staring out at the lashing rain and the chill wind seeping in with a whooshing sound between the edges of the window, until I began rummaging the non-existent bookshelves in my then home, dusting worm-eaten editions of what appeared to be Tinkle, Gokulam, Champak, Chandamama and Misha torn beyond recognition. A quick trip down memory lane reading the words from the books which bore no interest for my then grownup mind, made me go through the erstwhile thought processes of my preceding years; the times when Suppandi and Shikari Shambu held my rapt attention, and the talking animals of Champakvan gave an unfailing smirk.

At the beginning of the novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Yambo loses his episodic memory due to a stroke and can remember everything he has ever read, but does not remember his family, his past, or even his own name. Yambo goes to his childhood home, and searches through old newspapers, books, magazines and comic books to see if he can rediscover his lost past.

I noticed Gokulam’s cartoons of classroom satire that did to me then, what Dilbert cartoon does to me today. Perhaps that’s how I developed a liking for corporate satire, and the cartoon adorned walls of my work cubicle. Misha was my favorite, that I carried with me to school, reading during the long commutation. Not much has changed even now; from carrying a book with me to work to the hour-long commute, the patterns of childhood still stick on.

Somewhere between the lines of fiction lie the roots of what has become of you today. Yambo is unsuccessful in regaining past memories, though he relives the story of his generation from the books in his childhood home. But remembering is only a process and not the destination. As Umberto Eco deliciously puts it,

Everything is so much involved in and is so much a process of its opposite that, as it is almost fair to call death a process of life and life a process of death, so it is to call memory a process of forgetting and forgetting a process of remembering.

Fiction has a liberating effect. I seek refuge in fiction, when reality becomes a bit difficult to handle. Like an umbrella lets you enjoy the monsoon, even as it shelters you all the while.

Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

How would you feel if all the natural sights and sounds of your external world become mysterious and overloaded for your little mind to decipher? Or your skin feels a pang of irritation when a loved one tries to hug you? Or you are not sure if you have to feel happy or sad when your teacher tells you have passed an exam? This, in short, is the world of Autism.

Mark Haddon, in his award-winning debut The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, introduces us to the mind of an autistic child, through his protagonist Christopher Boone - a 15 year old autistic child. For Christopher, the world outside is full of chaos and symbols that convey special meanings.

He studies in a school for Children with Special Needs where his teacher Siobhan teaches him how to understand the world, the facial expressions of people with cartoons and drawings. Christopher is good at maths, doesn’t like the colors yellow and brown, and cannot stand if someone touches him. His parents have a unique method of hugging him - they spread their hands like a fan and let him touch their fingertips.

The story begins when Christopher finds a neighborhood dog killed and decides to find out who killed the dog and write a book about it. Driven by his favorite book The Hound of the Baskervilles he begins assimilating clues and deciphering them. His unique, emotionless mind is so disconnected from the world we are used to, that he can only think one way - Logical.

I was frightened in two ways. And one way was being far away from a place I was used to, and the other was being frightened of being near where father lived… and they were in inverse proportion… so that the total fear remained constant as I got farther away from home and further away from father…

He doesn’t understand what a friendship or marriage is - except how the dictionary describes them - and would do whatever it takes to find who killed the dog; and in the process pushes himself into an adventure that would reveal secrets of his own life and that of his parents.

Haddon’s experience in working with autistic children has certainly enabled him capture the innermost thoughts of the child very lucidly. Right through the story one can find Christopher at once both frightened and perseverant - typical of an autistic child. He studies simple things around him - like the railway map, roadside hoardings, food menu, people using an ATM, their facial expressions - and uses maths to identify patterns that could help him understand the world around him. He relates people’s faces to the drawings Siobhan shows him in school and tries to understand when a person is happy or sad.

And this is how I recognize someone if I don’t know who they are… I do a Search through my memories to see if I have met him before… If people say things which don’t make sense like “See you later alligator”, I do a Search and see if I have heard someone say this before.
And with these patterns he embarks on a journey that would change his life forever.

Haddon uses simple sentences to narrate the entire story - a book of 272 pages, double spaced, with drawings and patterns interspersed, one you can finish reading in one sitting; making you feel as if it were actually written by Christopher Boone himself. Every little thought expressed gives you an insight into how an autistic mind thinks, which is both educative and shockingly revealing. It is often the lack of knowledge that hinders the natural existence of a person with autism. We are so used to the natural rhythms of our sensory impulses, that an understanding of this rare other side is sure to make you feel empathic towards those suffering from autism.

The story makes you genuinely feel for the child, be it his autistic inhibitions or his sense of unbelievable perseverance. And by the time you read his last lines, you are bound to be taken over by a gush of emotions to give the little kid a tight hug. Or, just spread your hands like a fan and let him touch your fingertips.

Booked…

Over there at IndieQuill, Amrita tags me and I have to come up with a list of Indian authors/books I’ve read or want to read. This list is by no means exhaustive and scares me when I look back – there’s too much to read and too little time (even completing one book per week is becoming difficult). The ones in italics are those I’m yet to read.

1. City of Fear, Robin David
In the shy author’s own words, “How does a mad family remain sane when it is surrounded by madness? I can’t claim to have found all the answers, but I can tell you that we survived. A little scarred perhaps, but alive. That is the City of Fear in less than 100 words.” I couldn’t find it at Crossword last weekend, but determined to get my hands on it soon.
 
2. Maximum City, Suketu Mehta
Every time I spend time in the Crossword reading lounge, I tend to read a few pages from this. And the words seem to melt in your eyes. Must get hold of a copy soon.

3. Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie
I love this bloke. It’s a story narrated by the intricate tussles between emotions carried in the heart and the hallucinatory fantasies in the minds of its young protagonists (doesn’t that line sound just like Rushdie?), set in the backdrop of a torn paradise called Kashmir. A must read.

4. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
It’s a pity the book is banned in India. I managed to get hold of it at Barnes and Nobles while in Ohio earlier this year. Though roughly based on the life of Mohammed and the birth of Islam, this is another of his typical long winding utterly poetic narrative you wouldn’t want to miss.

5. Touch, Meena Kandasamy
I’m astounded at the maturity of this young poet. I read a few verses here and there and I’m totally in awe of her talent. She already has the blessing of Kamala Das who has written the foreward and the book was released by Gita Hariharan – and she’s all of 23 years.

6. Code Name God, Mani Bhaumik
The author is a scientist and the inventor of the technology that made LASIK eye surgery possible today. In this very unique book, he uses Science to attempt answers to questions about God and Spirituality. An interesting read.

7. The Burden of Foreknowledge, Jawahara Saidullah
I fell in love with her writing when I read this post in desicritics earlier this year. And some known sources tell me, this is just the kind of book I’m not supposed to miss.

8. Above Average, Amitabha Bagchi
It’s a story of a typical Delhi boy with an aptitude for science and math but yearning to be the drummer of a rock band. A supposed must read.

9. Ramayana Series, Ashok Banker
One of the contemporary masterpieces that lets you see the Ramayana in a whole new light. It’s a multiple-volume series, and all I need to do now is carry myself to the bookshop on this lazy Sunday afternoon to buy the entire series. Er, may be next week.

10. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
She didn’t win the Pulitzer for nothing. There is common sense, emotion and the tendency of people to continue to obsessively associate themselves to the orthodoxy of their origins with an intense stress on retaining their ancestral identity even though they have been living away from their native for ages. I loved the book.

11. The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
Haven’t watched the movie yet. But the book makes a good read. What attracts me in her writing is her fluent style of describing the minutest details, like ever-continuing strands of a noodle, starting from the color of the pillows to the mood of an individual at a given point. This is typical Lahiri.

12. The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
This year’s Booker winner. The written and word-of-mouth reviews have been good. I don’t want to draw conclusions even before reading this book, but I would still think Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch deserved the Booker. (ok, sue me.)

13. A Piece of Cake, Swati Kaushal
A Chicklit novel. The six foot tall modern female protagonist is a marketing lead, fighting her way in a ‘dirty’ corporate world, while her parents look for the most appropriate man to get her married soon. Funny, and for people who know the corporate circle, lots of things you can relate to.

14. An Equal Music, Vikram Seth
Not often can you find an author equally flamboyant with prose as well as poetry. Vikram Seth is a class part. If you’ve read and loved his poetry “All you who sleep tonight”, you would love this book as well. An Equal Music is musical, to say the least.

15. English August: Indian Story, Upamanyu Chatterjee
Set in the mid-80s, a young man enters IAS and is posted to a remote village where he feels a fish out of water. It’s a satirical narrative, and critics say it lacks spark. But I’m looking forward to reading it.

Now, let me see – Uma, Shub, Neels, Jax, Prat, Arunima, Srividya, Savitha; make the chain longer.

Michael Crichton’s Next

When you realize that a Chimpanzee differs from the humans by only around 500 genes and is not very different from the genetic composition of a severely autistic child, it is rather scary to realize how close Science has come to understanding the building blocks of life.

Scary, because from what we know of our human race it’s a dangerous proposition that man has the ability to manipulate life and human behavior to suit his own fancies. Too much knowledge might be as dangerous as too little.

Beginning with State of Fear and now Next, Michael Crichton questions the generally accepted and revered scientific facts, and attempts to show how what we understand as Science is actually a bunch of misconceptions spun for Political and Economic reasons. After his diatribe against Global Warming in State of Fear, he now takes up Genetics as his next target.

The story runs a number of parallel subplots each dealing with various aspects of Genetic research. A wealthy businessman who poses as a ‘capitalist with a conscience’ while indulging in heinous biological acts, a research firm which claims ownership of a lady and her child because they patented her father’s gene which is naturally inherited by the daughter, a media savvy scientist who steals research that he claims as his own, and a number of movie-style light hearted characters including a Parrot which swears, a Chimp that behaves like a human kid and a talking Orangutan.

The US Government invests a huge amount in biomedical research and Crichton points out that uncontrolled, unethical research might as well result in such bizarre circumstances as a completely legitimate ownership of a living human because his cells are owned by a corporation. Although gene therapy is said to cure diseases, the story tries to show how easy it is to manipulate them to an extent that human behavior can be controlled by an individual. Just like Dolly, the first cloned sheep that died a premature death, many genetically modified humans in the story develop bizarre complications in their system and die under strange circumstances.

Beyond science, Crichton discusses the ethics of humans playing a game of the ‘Creator and Controller’. Apparently leading to a world where humans are rendered as guinea pigs with ruthlessly fatal genetic experiments carried out on them without even a legitimate need to inform them beforehand; and the law does not have enough rules to control them.

Despite the near-realistic possibilities portrayed in the novel, it fails as a work of fictional literature. The incidents in the novel stand out as independent events connected by the lone idea of genetic research, but falls way short of having a strong storyline to link them together. Embedded fictional news clippings and research articles with complex biological jargons give you a feel of reading a science magazine rather than a full fledged novel.

The flow is broken. None of the characters stay in your mind after you’ve turned a page. The characters are too many in number, arbitrary and poorly formed. You’ll need to keep noting down the characters and what they are doing in every chapter to keep track of the convoluted story line. With so many characters and parallel incidents connecting them, it is very hard to find where the story - if at all there is one - is heading.

To be fair to all the good information and analysis it contains, the novel would have fared better as a collection of independent documentaries rather than a work of fiction. But the novel does pose an all important question - are we humans messing up with science?

Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch

Time and again there have been unknown faces that go unnoticed lost amidst the larger chaos of life. The simple emotions and passions of those common individuals, their fears and longings in such extraordinary times as a World War, remain concealed under the scars of a wartime. In this year’s Booker prize finalist, The Night Watch, Sarah Waters spins a tale around four such ordinary people who live through the tumultuous times of a war, fighting the secret demons of their own lives.

Kay is a ‘night watch’ ambulance driver rescuing people and removing dead bodies every time the air-raid siren goes off. Helen is Kay’s lover who nurtures a secret love for Julia, a crime-writer. Viv is a glamorous typist deeply in love with a married soldier. Duncan is Viv’s brother and fighting a lone battle within himself. The Night Watch is a story of these four seemingly unrelated people whose lives get connected in strange ways in a war-ravaged London.

The fascinating aspect of the novel is its unique narrative style, that begins in post-war London in 1947, with Kay wearing a man’s clothes wandering the London streets aimlessly, and moves backwards till its end in 1941.

So this, said Kay to herself, is the sort of person you’ve become: a person whose clocks and wrist-watches have stopped, and who tells the time, instead, by the particular kind of cripple arriving at her landlord’s door.

Waters begins the story introducing us to the present state of all her characters. At this point, none of them reveal their past and are rather guarded in what they actually express. The story gradually delves from the surface of all the guarded conversations into layers of trauma, of what they went through. Come 1944, and we are in the midst of air-raids and bombardment of shells. The four lives and their connections become more apparent, and then in 1941, the beginning of the war also marks the beginning of their relationships.

The overall momentum is gripping, be it the action of air raids or the intimate emotions of characters. Waters partially dwells on a feministic outline during the segments of Viv and her soldier lover, and the intricate love of Kay, Helen and Julia.

Kay moved her hand to the curve of Helen’s jaw and cupped it with her palm… gazing at her in a sort of wonder; unable to believe that something so fresh and unmarked could have emerged from so much chaos.

Viv’s physical and emotional struggles coping with her disastrous abortion attempt, is indicative of the stereotype man Waters portrays in Viv’s lover,

He stood in the bathroom doorway, as pale as ash: biting his fingernails… if only he’d come  and hold my hand, Viv thought. If only he’d put his arm around me… But all he did was meet her gaze and make a helpless sort of gesture.

Duncan’s life is probably the lame side of the novel. What was until then an equally powerful character in Duncan, gets to a rather tame finish when the reason of Duncan’s imprisonment is revealed. Waters could certainly have thought better. Otherwise, the characters are beautifully penned, and they sound as themselves, as the ones who have given in to the realities of their period.

The Night Watch is not a story of twists and suspense. But a simple and delicate story of four people whose past slowly unfolds, revealing how they became what they are.

Virginia Woolf

She was born this day 125 years ago. Happy Birthday, Ms. Woolf! And not very long ago I read her absolutely wonderful novel Mrs. Dalloway. Written in the stream of consciousness style – where the novel is narrated as the written equivalent of the character’s thought process – it’s one of such books which will always remain close to your heart.

The novel is more than a sheer literary delight. There is one line in particular, in the last page, about a rather insignificant character and quite an insignificant line in the context of the entire novel, but left me with a rather hollow feeling. It’s something like this – Ellie Henderson, Mrs. Dalloway’s poor cousin, has been invited to her party. And she’s introduced thus,

It was an event to her, going to a party. It was quite a treat just to see the lovely clothes.

Later (in the last page), Mrs. Dalloway’s party has just got over and all the invited visitors (which includes the Prime Minister) are leaving her house.

Even Ellie Henderson was going, nearly last of all, though no one had spoken to her, but she had wanted to see everything, to tell Edith.

As silly as it may sound, I get this strange notion that, for some reason, I can relate myself to this feeling. Stream of consciousness, huh?

The Handmaid’s Tale

Not that I’m a big fan of Margaret Atwood, but there’s something about her writing that makes me skip a beat every time I read her. She has a way about unbottling innermost thoughts that they sometimes startle you. And it so turns out that, in hindsight, they are nothing but your own thoughts at different points in time. 

The Handmaid’s Tale is no less. At times, it seems far stretched. But it’s only when you get a little deeper that you realize, it’s more than what is apparent. The story builds a country where certain women are enlisted to bear children for the elite. They are pressured under a continuous dogma of doing the holy thing by being what they are, and made to believe they are doing a service to humanity. The Handmaid’s Tale is the story of one such woman.

I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.

Well, I wouldn’t call it a fiction altogether, though a lot of it is. The rest is just a manifestation of what is seen all around you and yet unnoticeable. Go out to the market, to your nearest store, to the coffee shop, to the restaurant, in the bus, on the roads. To your own house. You’ll find a handmaid everywhere. In different manifestations. And some call themselves – the housewife (or its latest version – the homemaker).

Atwood, in a conversation with Bill Moyers, speaks about the book,

[But] it’s a blueprint of the kind of thing that human beings do when they’re put under a certain sort of pressure. And I made it a rule for the writing of this book that I would not put anything into it that human societies have not already done.

Societies are ruled by fear. Fear of religion, and fear of god knows what. Religion is something that is (atleast in theory) supposed to discipline people’s minds. But the way it has evolved today, it is one of the most comfortable excuses to create more such handmaids. The looming threat is that of evolving into a dystopian society, if we continue with the oppression of women in the name of tradition and religion.

Margaret Atwood: That’s exactly right. If your government says, “Not only am I your government, but I represent the true religion,” if you disagree with it you’re not just of another faction. You’re evil.
Bill Moyers: But you don’t imagine that could happen here?
Margaret Atwood: Want to bet? Want to lay some bets as to that?
Bill Moyers: I would never bet against Margaret Atwood.

Neither would I.

Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

Just finished reading this absolutely lovely book. Thanks to Prat for lending me her copy and making me read it.

If there is one thing in life that continues to leave us puzzled beyond all our acquired wisdom – it is Life itself. Humans are born to, eventually, die. But despite this awareness and the multitude of sufferings and ugly paradoxes that often pushes one to the edge of his sanity, there develops a strange affection to the very activity of living. It’s one of those mystical allusions beyond the scope of any human wisdom.

Ben Okri’s 1991 Booker winner The Famished Road, is a metaphorical narrative of this strange affection, rich in symbolism and gripping imageries of a surreal reality. The story is narrated by Azaro – a spirit child, born into the painful world of Nigerian Parents and set to return to its spirit world very soon. His mother is a hawker screaming her soul out to make their ends meet, while his father labors in an equally appalling job.

Azaro is born as an Abiku – which means born to die in Yoruba. Okri makes his first emotional strike indicating the strange affection phenomenon, when he writes the words of Azaro as he is about to be born into his wretched world of poverty, hunger and struggling parents.

But sometimes I think it was a face that made me want to stay. I wanted to make happy the bruised face of the woman who would become my mother.

The story moves between Azaro’s adventures in the real world with his struggling parents and dirty politics, and another peculiar world limited to Azaro’s vision – Madame Koto’s palm wine bar, the (famished) road and the forest – which are crowded with spirits, and supernatural elements. Often it is Azaro’s visionary world that leads him through all the tribulations of the real world.

I began to feed on my hunger. I fed well and had a mighty appetite. I dipped into myself and found other worlds waiting… A world of famine, famishment and drought… I lost myself and felt myself becoming light. I listened to the music of famine.

Azaro’s spirit friends, repeatedly play tricks on him trying to lure him back to their spirit world. But Azaro manages to escape them every time until he finds the solemn serenity in the arms of his parents at the beginning of every night. Okri has created Azaro himself as a metaphor depicting the oxymoronic essence of the state of living, as he puts it beautifully,

Because each new generation begins with nothing and everything. They may not know that they know, but they do… They have an infinity of hope and an eternity of struggles.

With every reference to the surreal visions – many headed spirits, men with three eyes and sometimes just strange lights watching Azaro – Okri reiterates the circular nature of life – to suffer, to hope, to persist in hope and eternally condemned to repeat this cycle of imageries. The extensive imagery of Azaro’s supernatural visions tends to slow down the story for a wee bit, but only to build up into a powerful account that makes him not wanting to go back to his spirit world, and choosing to stay in his parents’ world of struggles.

There are many riddles amongst us that neither the living nor the dead can answer.

But riddles need not be answered to be enjoyed. And in the process of writing the story, Ben Okri has woven an intricate web of riddles rich in literary fervor, sure to captivate any reader drawing him into a sea of magnificent imageries. The Famished Road is a sheer literary delight that, in its inimitable style, sends out a strong message on the essence of living.