10 Feb / Prayer for the Living by Ben Okri [in Shelf Awareness]
Best known for the 1991 Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road, Nigerian author Ben Okri has maintained a prolific output of lauded fiction, poetry, and essays. His provocative collection, Prayer for the Living, presents 24 stories and a single poem that include previously published pieces from 1993 onward.
Okri’s longest stories prove the strongest, as if they are claiming the space for comparatively intense narrative development. In “Dreaming of Byzantium,” “unreality makes the world” for a man who awakes in a luxurious hotel with a woman claiming to be his wife ready for their Istanbul explorations. “Alternative Realities Are True” follows a London detective solving murder out of synch with time. And “Don Ki-Otah and the Ambiguity of Reading” is a quirky Don Quixote-riff complete with a meta-reference to Okri himself.
Okri imaginatively plays with various literary forms among his more compelling shorter pieces. The titular “Prayer for the Living” is a survivor’s snapshot homage to the missing and dead. “The Lie” is a modern fable about a king’s “search for truth.” Two atmospheric short-shorts are labeled “stoku,” an amalgam of story and haiku that Okri created in 2009. Inventiveness aside, Okri is equally assured with more forthright approaches: in “Boko Haram” (1), (2) and (3), he writes of tragedy so horrific as if its presentation required division over three parts separated in between by some 100 pages filled with other stories.
Writing across countries, citizens, centuries, Okri effortlessly showcases his literary fluency. Even beyond specific details of time and place, global audiences will discover resonating enlightenment and entertainment between these taut pages.
Discover: Booker Prize winner Ben Okri collects 24 inventive short stories and a single poem in which he showcases his fluency across countries, cultures, even centuries.
Review: “Fiction,” Shelf Awareness, February 5, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2021