Saro-Wiwa, Ken - Graham Hough (review date 3 July 1986)
Graham Hough (review date 3 July 1986)
SOURCE: "Afro-Fictions," in London Review of Books, Vol. 8, No. 12, July 3, 1986, pp. 22-3.
[Hough is an English author and educator. In the following review, he praises Saro-Wiwa's ability to capture the peculiarities of Nigerian life in A Forest of Flowers.]
Ken Saro-Wiwa's extremely accomplished collection of short stories [A Forest of Flowers] stands to Nigeria in something of the same relation as Joyce's Dubliners to Ireland. They are brief epiphanies, each crystallising a moment, a way of living, the whole course of a life. When as a youngster I first read Dubliners I remember being baffled by the way eerie characters and their bizarre motivations were calmly accepted as part of the ordinary nature of things. Saro-Wiwa's tales bring back something of this feeling. There is great variety in these glimpses. The book is divided into two parts—innocence and experience, you...
[The entire page is 692 words long]
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