Isara a Voyage Around Essay - Softcover

Wole Soyinka

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0749391707 ISBN 13: 9780749391706

Publisher: Methuen Publishing Ltd, 1991

Synopsis

This evocation of Nigeria before and during World War II has been written by the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is a follow-up to "Ake: The Years of Childhood".

About this title

From the Publisher

"One of the finest achievements of this author's varied and brilliant career."--Chicago Tribune

From Publishers Weekly

Like his evocative memoir Ake: The Years of Childhood , this semi-fictionalized, multigenerational family saga by the Nigerian novelist-poet-dramatist Nobel laureate is rich with the sights, sounds and textures of his native land under colonial rule. At the center is his schoolteacher father ("Essay"), unflappable, philosophical, given to browsing in exotic journals; we also meet Soyinka's grandparents locked in a sometimes tempestuous marriage, and a large cast of secondary characters, among them merchant adventurer Sipe ("Resolute Rooster"), a cripple named Node, and Ray Gunnar, a Trinidadian stowaway turned huckster. In musical, quicksilver prose, Soyinka magically re-creates a world in which local healers compete with pharmacists, and Yoruba religion vies with Christianity; African customs, rituals and traditional social relations are reshaped as Nigerians struggle to find their place in a modernizing society. After Mussolini attacked Ethiopia, the British whipped up patriotism in the Nigerian protectorate; Soyinka probes his father's generation's uneasy love-hate relationship with the British.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Methuen Publishing Ltd
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0749391707
• ISBN 13: 9780749391706
• Binding: Paperback