Stars of the New Curfew (Magill Book Reviews)

Fiction is, among other things, a kind of news. Of the many novels and story-collections published each month, most are old news, stale the day they are published. A few are fresh, surprising, announcing a new voice. Ben Okri’s STARS OF THE NEW CURFEW is among the latter. The six stories in this volume offer a phantasmagoric view of contemporary life in Nigeria, from the teeming streets of Lagos to an unnamed village torn by civil war. What makes them special, though, is not their subject matter but rather the manner in which they are told.

Okri has a marvelous way of beginning a story, at once matter-of-fact and ominously suggestive: “I was at work one day when a man came up to me and asked me my name.” That sentence (the opening of “Worlds That Flourish”) seems straightforward enough, but it leads to a nightmarish journey to the realm of the dead. All of the stories in the book are infused with the fantastic to a greater or lesser degree, yet all of them are grounded in palpable physical realities--the sights and sounds and smells of Okri’s world. The long title story is narrated by a salesman of patent medicines the side effects of which, he learns, far outweigh their curative powers. When his boss presses him to peddle a new wonder-drug (cure-all, aphrodisiac, and hallucinogen rolled into one), his troubles increase. The story suggests the fate of modern Africa, but it is no clear-cut allegory. Like dreams, Okri’s stories derive their power form their oddly circumstantial quality; things happen, events flash by, and attend the there is always a residue of strangeness.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXV, May 15, 1989, p. 1607.

Kirkus Reviews. LVII, May 1, 1989, p. 655.

Library Journal. CXIV, June 15, 1989, p. 81.

Listener. CXX, September 1, 1988, p. 25.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. September 24, 1989, p. 3.

New Statesman and Society. I, July 29, 1988, p. 43.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIV, August 13, 1989, p. 12.

The Observer. July 10, 1988, p. 42.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXV, May 19, 1989, p. 67.

Time. CXXXIII, June 19, 1989, p. 66.

The Times Literary Supplement. August 5, 1988, p. 857.