The Interpreters

By Wole Soyinka

Book Overview

From the first Black winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature--his debut novel about a group of young Nigerian intellectuals trying to come to grips with themselves and their changing country. First published in 1965.

They are the interpreters. Drawn together by their hopes, loves, dissatisfactions, and the daily lives and deaths around them, five young Nigerian intellectuals evoke a new lost and found generation. From their wild drinking bouts at the Club Cambana to their individual pursuits of personal and professional integrity, they simultaneously find themselves as seekers and prophets as they attempt to define their identity in a world where their cultural past and Western-influenced present are brought into conflict. The Interpreters combines the uniquely sensitive observations of the gifted Wole Soyinka with his trademark mad comedy. Now back in print, his debut novel is a book with universal relevance and irresistible appeal.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0593467213
• ISBN13: 9780593467213
• Release Date: September 2021
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

An African novel with a '60s spirit and sense of humor.

"The Interpreters" are a group of Nigerian intellectuals who have traveled outside their home country and who have returned to confront and understand the gods of their ancestors, the government of their country, and their own fates. The book reminded me of some of my favorite "anarchic" novels of the '50s and '60s-"Lucky Jim," "The End of the Road," even "The Crying of Lot 49." Sagoe, the journalist character, has a fascinating and scatalogical philosophy of life that parodies French existentialism very cleverly. The other characters include a frustrated engineer who becomes a great sculptor, a painter hard at work throughout the narrative on an epic canvas depicting all the main characters as versions of the gods of Yorubaland, and an eccentric white Englishwoman who has married an unsuitable Nigerian bureaucrat and befriended his more liberal mother. The book works on several levels--as farce, as cultural critique of colonialism, and as an exploration of the ongoing legacy of the Yoruba gods who animate and obsess the interpreters. Most importantly, it is an entertaining and unpredictable story full of sharp insights and surprises.