My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

by Amos Tutuola

Book Overview

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Amos Tutuola's second novel, was first published in 1954. It tells the tale of a small boy who wanders into the heart of a fantastical African forest, the dwelling place of innumerable wild, grotesque and terrifying beings. He is captured by ghosts, buried alive and wrapped up in spider webs, but after several years he marries and accepts his new existence. With the appearance of the television-handed ghostess,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0571316913
• ISBN13: 9780571316915
• Release Date: July 2014
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Magical Realism at it's Best

This is a fantastic book and a milestone in post-postmodern/poststructuralist literature using the techniques of Magical Realism. As a Google search will turn up, Magical Realism expresses the nostalgia of global modernity for the traditional worlds it has vanquished and subsumed. Far from representing an alternative to or a subversion of an emergent world order, magical realism is both an effect of and a vehicle for globalization, itself only the latest phase of a centuries-long process of modernization. At one time understood to be mainly, if not exclusively, a Latin American phenomenon, magical realism has emerged over the last three decades as an artistic movement of international significance. As writers from Latin America, North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East have joined a literary movement attracting an ever widening international audience, the magical realist novel has arguably become the preeminent form of fiction in the contemporary world. Tutuola's myth's come from the Yoruba religious tradition and mythology of Nigeria. The neat synopsis normally given for a realist novel is unattainable in this type of work because the story is mediated to us only through loose and oten disjointed plots and pieces of stories intricately conjoined. It consists of several stoires within a story-of the main story with a journey motif and with digressions that are philosophical, sociological, psycholgoical, historical and religious in their discursive origins. The thread, in a sequence of sporadic happenings throughout the whole stretch of the main character's journey of discovery, weaves its way along, tying together the scattered and floating story lines, events and difuse epsisodes. Myths and local beliefs are part of the real, life-world, not that they exist next to the real world This is serous fiction and not merely escapist.