Amos Tutuola The Palm Wine Drinkard Pdf

• Amos Tutuola

Publication date1952 (UK)1953 (US)Pages125Followed byThe Palm-Wine Drinkard (subtitled 'and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead's Town') is a novel published in 1952 by the author. The first African novel published in English outside of Africa, this tale based on folktales is written in a modified Yoruba English or English. In it, a man follows his brewer into the land of the dead, encountering many spirits and adventures.

The novel has always been controversial, inspiring both admiration and contempt among Western and Nigerian critics, but has emerged as one of the most important texts in the African literary canon, translated into more than a dozen languages. ^., p. 7., p. 10, 15, 22, 25, 77, 91., p. 87., p. 15, 18, 49., p. 15., p. 21., p. 18, 21., p. 26., p. 41., p. 31., p. 44., p. 51., p. 143.Works Cited. Abiechina, E.

'Amos Tutuola and the Oral Tradition'.: 85–106. Lindfors, Bernth (1975). Critical Perspectives on Amos Tutuola. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press. Lindfors, Bernth (1999). The Blind Men and the Elephant and Other Essays in Biographical Criticism. Africa World Press.

(1968). 'Tutuola, Son of Zinjanthropus'. Busara. Palmer, Eustace (1978). The International Fiction Review.

Retrieved 20 January 2015. Rodman, Selden (20 September 1953). 'Book Review of Palm-Wine Drinkard'. The New York Times Book Review. Staff Writer (1 May 1954). 'Portrait: A Life in the Bush of Ghosts'.

Thomas, Dylan (6 July 1952). 'Blithe Spirits'. The Observer. West, Anthony (5 December 1953). 'Book Review of Palm-Wine Drinkard'.

The New Yorker.External links. Petri Liukkonen. Books and Writers.

Book Descriptions: The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos TutuolaWhen Amos Tutuola's first novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, appeared in 1952, it aroused exceptional worldwide interest. Drawing on the West African (Nigeria) Yoruba oral folktale tradition, Tutuola described the odyssey of a devoted palm-wine drinker through a nightmare of fantastic adventure. Since then, The Palm-Wine Drinkard has been translated into more than 15 languages and has come to be regarded as a masterwork of one of Africa's most influential writers. Rating: it was amazingDear Mr.

Amos Tutuola,When I was a small boy I was told the story of a perfect gentleman who went to a market and returned from it with a girl that followed him. As he went back home, he kept giving back the pieces of him that were borrowed, so that by the time he got to his home, he was only a skull. And the girl deceived by his beauty now only a slave.Well, Mr.

Amos Tutuola

Tatuola, thank you very much for taking me through many indescribable adventures and many incomprehensible mysteries. I enjoyed them well, as a child should. But they reminded me of those days, when I was a small boy.

Of the time I got scared when the lamp was taken away, and my fear disappeared when the light was restored. Of when I did not know how to be afraid when there was light, and when there were people around me. Now, I remember those days and I wonder why fear will be here beside me even when the sun shines, and people around me smile. Those days I was only worried about tomorrow if I hadn't talked my homework, because mother would scold me and my teacher would cane me. Mother won't ask me now whether I have done what I have to do, she'll ask me where is the result of what I have done. If I meet her by the road, - my childhood teacher, she'll be looking to see whether I have a suit and a tie, whether my smile says that I have seen and conquered.

And my fear may be that she will only wave, and ask what art has done to me. Not what I have done to art.I want to go back to one of those days, when laughter was laughter and not the superfluous hiding of what lies beneath. When stories genuinely scared or made me genuinely happy, whether the next day I had forgotten them or not.

When I knew that tomorrow will come, and apart from its simple fears, it will come and go. When I knew there was a man up there, beyond the infinite skies, that said son, I hold the universe together, in perfection, and if you only believe this, everything will unfold as it should.

I want a tiny bit of those days.And to meet men like you -in person or in the pages of a book, -who will leave a legacy, who craft stories that will once in a while, remind us of what it was to be a child.For looking beyond your limited self and leaving us this enduring story, may immortality always be your share.Faithfully,Reader in crisis, etc. Rating: really liked itRead this book on the basis that it is impossible to resist chapter titles such as ‘AN EGG FED THE WHOLE WORLD’ and ‘PAY WHAT YOU OWE ME AND VOMIT WHAT YOU ATE’, and for passages of tortured syntax such as: Then my wife asked him how could a man buy a pig in a bag? But the man replied that there was no need of testing the load, he said that once we put it on our head either it was heavier than what we could carry or not, anyhow we should carry it to the town. So we stood before that man and his load. But when I thought it over that if I put it on my head and could not carry it, then I should put it down at once, and if that man would force me not to put it down, I had a gun and cutlass here, I should shoot him immediately. Amos Tutuola wrote this novel aged 26 in his “primitive” English manner (a style that Dylan Thomas, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Raymond Queneau found remarkable), taking his content from Yoruba folk tales, which to modern readers might fall under the heading surrealism or magical realism or some such unhelpful label.

This novella is a bewitching and torturous read (the style, if close-read, might drive one to madness) for fans of red-people, invisible-pawns, bush-ghosts, and elusive palm-wine tapsters. Rating: it was amazingA Nigerian folktale of Tutuola’s own invention, written in Pidgin English. Like any good folktale, it has the sense that anything can happen; but it improves on the usual model with its particularly easy air of being completely out of control.

It’s been criticized for showing Nigerians as amoral drunkards and witlessly superstitious. But never mind that, because it’s awesome craziness.

For example:We could not travel on the Deads’ road because of fearful dead babies, etc.We had sold our death to somebody at the door for the sum of £70:18:6d and lent our fear to somebody at the door as well on interest of £3:10:0d per month, so we did not care about death and we did not fear again. Rating: it was amazingI read this book many years ago. Today, I picked the book off my shelves and re-read the first lines. It still makes the hair rise on the back of my neck.I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life.But when my father noticed that I could not do any work more than to drink, he engaged an expert palm-wine-tapster for me; he had no other work more than to tap palm-wine every day.

So my father gave me a palm-tree farm which was nine miles square and it contained 560,000 palm-trees, and this palm-wine tapster was tapping one hundred and fifty kegs of palm-wine every morning, but before 2 o’clock p.m., I would have drunk it all; after that he would go and tap another 75 kegs.The book tells of the sad demise of our hero’s palm-wine tapster and of the search to find him. In effect, this single narrative holds together a sequence of quite separate folk-stories. For several pages, one feels one is entering a rather genial world, full of the folksy stories of the kind one might read to children.But then one finds that these are not children’s stories at all.

Much more than those of the Brothers Grimm or of Hans-Christian Anderson, these stories are harsh and blood-curdling, almost too painful to read.Their major themes are dismemberment, abduction and death. We meet Death himself, whose household furniture and firewood is made from human remains.

We meet a “gentleman” of great beauty who has abducted a young woman. This man has hired his body-parts from traders, and when he returns these to their owners, he is reduced merely to being a skull who lives in a hole in the ground.It is not, however, the single horrific images or single stories that are difficult to cope with, but rather the accumulation of these images, one piled upon another.Later in life, Tutuola gained some small acceptance in the Nigerian literary establishment. However, for many years, he was disparaged by his fellow-writers who disliked his portrayal of Yoruba culture and his fluid, un-literary style. They perhaps too felt that, as the comedy of the first pages dissipates into horror, that this is a very strange book indeed. Rating: it was amazingIn some times and places, madmen were viewed with a sort of wary deference. Were they simply insane, or touched by the hand of God?

You couldn't be sure. That same sort of holy madness - chilling and funny by turns - infuses every page of this story. What part is myth and what part is novel? You can't really tell where one ends and the other begins. To pick up this book is to find yourself unexpectedly wrenched from the world and deposited into a dangerous wonderland that almost, but not quite, makes sense. I wish I'd known years ago how strange and great this book is. I already look forward to many re-readings.

Rating: it was amazingI don't know of another writer like Tutuola. The creatures jump out of the woodwork like the good boogers they are: you know they took time to develop, but you weren't conscious of that and now it's as if grandma just fell in your lap, chewing on kibbles 'n' bits between watermelon seeds and strumming a cold pumpkin like a guitar-impressive.

There is a logic if you care to think about it, but it's one from eons past. And the great thing is that the guy has nothing to prove, nothing to contrive, and no one to impress. There are no computers, no keys, no Western angst, nor Victorian falsities.what relationships?

Just an eight-legged, fat, hairy, onion that draws in the dust, or somethin'. Take it or leave it, the quest continues; it's the primordial soup. Rating: it was amazingThe Palm Wine Drinkard is a brilliant, absurd piece of literature. I had never heard of Amos Tutuola (to my friend’s surprise) and had no real expectations and was subsequently terribly delighted!All the Nigerian authors I have read thus far, Achebe, Adichie, Abani and Soyinka have all been wonderful. I have a great affinity for African literature and the Nigerians like their film making have found a unique way to capture their storytelling.This is exactly what Tutuola is about. His style is one of a kind, his book reads like the narrator is sitting under a tree retelling a story that happened. Had he been one of my kinsman it would filled with “and then, and then, and then,” interspersed throughout the rather ridiculous tales.The Palm Wine Drinkard (not drunkard) is about a man who just loves his palm wine and goes on a rather long journey in search of his former palm wine tapster.The plot is quite ridiculous.

It reminds me of an uncle of mine whose imagination knows no bounds. There is an element of truth in some of the personal stories he has told us over the years but just that, an element. The rest is pure fabrication and although you know it is far fetched you remain engrossed because it is highly entertaining.Tutuola does not polish his language but writes in a style that is exceptionally unique and individual. Wikipedia says this was the first African book translated into English in 1951 and it reads like something that was directly translated. Done deliberately by the author, the language adds to the absurdity of the text but also the wonderful nature of African storytelling.It is a delightfully short book that can be completed within a day. I’d say it would make a fun read for anyone keen on African stotytelling and folktales.

Rating: it was amazingthis is the book that made his name. It has been translated but i do not know how: a lot of the pleasure is in the voice, the unique version of Nigerian english used, perhaps proving that you cannot fail to make poetry when you use english. Rating: it was okI'm puzzled by the popularity of this novel. I own a small new and used book store and I cannot keep this book stocked. It simply won't linger on the shelf. I have people asking for it all the time. After reading it, I can't for the life of me figure out why.For the first fifteen pages, I was agog at the odd use of language.

I thought I had found an early predecessor to Gordon Lish and Gary Lutz. Not a father or grandfather. Maybe a queer uncle or family friend. But soon, I found myself frowning and sighing and 'Oh, godding!' Not because of the strange English (in fact, that was the one saving grace of the novel) but because what I realized I was reading was a kind of a fable or folk tale that lacked, completely, any hint of subtext. I realized I was reading someone's dreams.Have you ever had to sit through the telling of a dream? Dreams are not 'adventures' and there is nothing 'incredible' about them because you can do anything you want in a dream so nothing means anything.

It's funny, maybe, for the first few seconds or half-minute. But then it's just deadening. Because dreams aren't stories.

And the story of a dream, told in a Kerouac rat-at-tat-tat, without craft or craftiness, is just not worth listening to. And when I think of it, if this book had been read to me, in short bursts, I might have appreciated it. Probably not. I don't know. Rating: it was amazingMarvelous story of unconventional, non-linear, Nigerian cosmological structure. Quite an adventure in language and atmosphere, and almost certainly unlike anything else you'll have read.Just a note derived from my comment on 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.'

If you want to start with Tutuola, start with 'The Palm-Wine Drinkard.' You can go on to MLitBoG (4/5 stars from me) if you dig it and want more. Both are darkly imaginative and funny sagas set in the West African idea of a chthonic 'bush' where the real and spirit worlds intermingle, written in a broken English with elements of Nigerian Pidgin, but largely Tutuola's fantastic, poetical idiolect. For other books that might better suit the unadventurous Western lib arts educated dabbler and that work with the cosmological idea of a 'bush of ghosts,' read Helen Oyeyemi or Nnedi Okoroafor. You might 'get' Tutuola and enjoy his writing, or you might hate it, just as with any unusual author.

But I do want to address the egotistical numpties who say stupid things such as 'people who like this book are only working out their colonialist guilt.' Tutuola books are unique, iconic and magical, and no more primitive than, say, Ulysses. It's just prose, people. And it has the great advantage that you will discover very quickly whether or not you like it, and you can always put the book down and leave it for others to enjoy. Rating: it was amazinghere are some words that are capitalized in the bookCOWRIESBOTH WIFE AND HUSBAND IN THE HUNGRY-CREATURE'S STOMACH'RETURN THE PARTS OF THE BODY TO THE OWNERS; OR HIRED PARTS OF THE COMPLETE GENTLEMAN'S BODY TO THE RETURNED'AFRAID OF TOUCHING TERRIBLE CREATURES IN BAG'THE LADY WAS NOT TO BE BLAMED FOR FOLLOWING THE SKULL AS A COMPLETE GENTLEMAN'THE INVESTIGATOR'S WONDERFUL WORK IN THE SKULL FAMILY'S HOUSE'THE DESCRIPTION OF THE CURIOUS CREATURE:-NONE OF THE DEADS TOO YOUNG TO ASSAULT. DEAD-BABIES ON THE ROAD-MARCH TO THE DEADS' TOWNTHREE GOOD CREATURES TOOK OVER OUR TROUBLE - THEY WERE:- DRUM, SONG, AND DANCEWHO WILL TAKE THE MOUSE?THE 'WRAITH ISLAND'PAY WHAT YOU OWE ME AND VOMIT WHAT YOU ATE'THE WORK OF THE FAITHFUL-MOTHER IN THE WHITE TREE'WE AND THE WISE KING IN THE WRONG TOWN WITH THE PRINCE KILLERTO SEE THE MOUNTAIN-CREATURES WAS NOT DANGEROUS BUT TO DANCE WITH THEM WAS THE MOST DANGEROUSI AND MY PALM-WINE TAPSTER IN THE DEAD'S TOWNAN EGG FED THE WHOLE WORLD. Rating: liked itREVIEW on the blog: initially, I hated this book hahaa.

The gory descriptions had me cringing and I found some stuff quite demonic (I couldn't read it at night before bed because I was afraid I'd dream of some of the weird ass creatures from the book). This book is just an extreme version of the Ananse The Spider stories lol. It got better after I gave this book a second try. Amos Tutuola is a great, great writer with a freaky imagination. I loved the writing style, just not the gory descriptions - those were gross to me. Give the book a try if you like out-of-this-world, weird stuff. African literature enthusiasts swear by this book, and I understand why- Amos Tutuola is an amazing storyteller.

I'm glad I went on a read binge today to finish the book- FINALLLY (I've been trying to finish this book since October 2014. Yes y'all, its been a struggle!