Isara: A Voyage Around "Essay" - Hardcover

Soyinka, Wole

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394540778 ISBN 13: 9780394540771

Publisher: Random House, 1989

Synopsis

The Nobel Prize-winning novelist and playwright examines the colonial period in his native Nigeria during his father's and grandfather's generations, revealing the human complexities of political oppression

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: Random House
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0394540778
• ISBN 13: 9780394540771
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 262