The unnamed, naive Palm-Wine Drinkard, who likes to call himself ‘Father of gods Who Could Do Anything in This World’ is the narrator of this story and he takes readers through his peculiar adventures with his wife, in search for their dead palm-wine tapster. The Palm-Wine Drinkard’s tapster mysteriously falls from a palm tree as he is tapping palm wine for the Drinkard and dies. Deeply saddened by this great loss (in the plenitude of palm wine the tapster used to collect), the Palm-Wine Drinkard starts his quest to find his dead tapster. His search to find the tapster commences a crazy, frightful journey filled with evil spirits, demons and other strange, supernatural creature encounters. This is basically an African fantasy book.
I hated this book, initially. The horrid descriptions had me cringing and I found some stuff quite demonic (I couldn’t read this at night before bed because I was afraid I’d dream of some of the weird-ass creatures from the book). This book reminded me of the ‘Ananse the Spider’ folktales, but The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a more extreme and exaggerated type of folktale! The story-line got better when I gave this book a second try after abandoning it for sometime. Amos Tutuola is a great writer with a freaky imagination.
Yemisi (verified owner) –