Enchanted nightmare Life and Times, , 2 Edition

Ben Okri would probably concur with this view. In the Afterword to his 1996 novel Dangerous Love he admits that its origins may be found in his 1981 novel The Landscapes Within, written when he was 21. Okri had wanted to write a novel which "celebrated the small details of life as well as the g...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNew Straits times
Main Author Reviewed by John Evans Note: Dangerous Love. By Ben Okri. (Phoenix, 401 pages).
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Kuala Lumpur The New Straits Times Press (M) Berhad 17.09.1997
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Summary:Ben Okri would probably concur with this view. In the Afterword to his 1996 novel Dangerous Love he admits that its origins may be found in his 1981 novel The Landscapes Within, written when he was 21. Okri had wanted to write a novel which "celebrated the small details of life as well as the great, the inner as well as the outer". The partial achievement of The Landscapes Within is magnificently fulfilled in his new novel. Nigerian-born Okri sets his novel in the Lagos and its suburbs of the early '70s. An epic of daily life on one level, it charts the course of people whose lives are indeed an enervating saga of "quiet desperation". The protagonist is Omovo, an office worker and talented painter, searching for love and artistic freedom. Okri - or Omovo, rather - is able to see heaven in the mucus-smeared wall of a communal bathroom as much as in a wild flower. Whatever is being depicted - the ordinary, the hellish or the (transiently) heavenly - Okri's style is transcendent, giving physical shape to a metaphysical world, and seamlessly alternating between stark realism and a realism that borders on phantasmagoria.