Novel
The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Amos Tutuola · 1952
Synopsis
A man who does nothing but drink palm wine from morning to night loses the man who used to climb the trees for him, fallen and dead. Determined to get him back, he sets out for the town of the dead. On the road he buys a head on credit, frees a woman whom a perfect gentleman has seduced with hired limbs, fathers a child who devours everything given to him, and meets Famine in person. Each ordeal calls for a metamorphosis.
Context
The book was written in six days, in an English steeped in Yoruba and indifferent to correctness, by a clerk of the Ministry of Labour who sent it to London on his own initiative: T. S. Eliot supported it, and so did Dylan Thomas. The French translation followed the very next year, by a well-known French poet, and its author was then so little known that some believed the translator to be hiding behind a pseudonym. The text had been completed in 1946 and waited six years for its publisher.
Who it is for
A short narrative in deliberately incorrect language. The debate over its reception is part of how it is read.
Prizes and reception
Translated into some fifteen languages, it is the first African book published in England to have had international success.