Isara (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

In 1981, Wole Soyinka published a memoir of his boyhood in a Nigerian village, AKE: THE YEARS OF CHILDHOOD. ISARA: A VOYAGE AROUND “ESSAY” might be called a prequel to AKE, since it deals with Soyinka’s father and his generation, avid for Western learning, hopeful about their country’s future. In many ways, though, it is misleading to call ISARA a memoir. Soyinka himself notes that he has “ruptured” chronology and has used fictitious names throughout. More important, he has sought to re-create the thoughts, the inner experience, of the people he describes. This novelistic license is apparent not only in interior monologues but in Soyinka’s very way of telling his story: deliberately fragmented, oblique.

ISARA, in short, is a strange book, defying expectations, and some readers, feeling lost, will be tempted to stop before they have really gotten underway. That would be a mistake, for ISARA is richly rewarding: diabolically funny, poignant, full of memorable characters.

At the center of the book is the figure based on Soyinka’s father: the schoolmaster Soditan Akinyode, whose initials prompt the nickname “Essay.” (Soyinka’s subtitle, he acknowledges, is taken from John Mortimer’s play A VOYAGE AROUND MY FATHER.) The intrepid Essay, whose infectious enthusiasm plays in the reader’s mind against the troubled history of postcolonial Nigeria, corresponds with a fellow teacher in the United States: Wade Cudeback of Ashtabula, Ohio; their meeting in Essay’s native village of Isara, after years of friendship via mail, concludes the narrative. Neither straight fiction nor straight memoir, ISARA is wholly successful, and not to be missed.

Sources for Further Study

Library Journal. CXIV, October 1, 1989, p.96.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. October 15, 1989, p.2.

The New Republic. CCI, December 11, 1989, p.40.

The New York Times. November 3, 1989, p. B13(N).

The New York Times Book Review. XCIV, November 12, 1989, p.11.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXVI, August 18, 1989, p.44.