Last Bookstore Discovery

On my days staying in downtown LA I made sure to swing by the Last Bookstore. It's LA's baddest biggie indie bookstore (like Powell's in Portland or The Strand in New York) and as such, as a personal rule, I tried to find something to purchase. This visit I made with about twenty-five minutes before closing, so walking around was mostly rushed.

I came to a spot and saw the following binding:

Stars...of the New...Curfew? I read sideways. Ben Okri, as the author's name, had me thinking Africa, and I pulled it off the shelf.

It was slim and inexpensive, and Ben Okri was a celebrated Nigerian-British author whose works were finally getting published in the US (the blurb said---this book was from 1988). I'll say...Ben Okri is now Sir Ben Okri, a poet, screenwriter, novelist, and activist, and winner of Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road. (The Booker Prize is the one other writers perk up for.)

That was all research done after I had read the stories contained inside. Where has this dude been, and why am I only finding out about him now? I guess that's true of so, so many fantastic writers, but still...

The stories take place in and around Lagos and some cities in the interior. The city is war torn, people are hungry, angry, and desperate, and a connection to the occasional magical realm is natural and realistic. In the second story after a car crash things go so sideways in Okri's descriptions (people's feet are on backwards, their arms bend the wrong way, the huts in the village all have mirrors on the outside, et al) that you start to think it's turning to sci-fi. It doesn't, but it opens the world up similar to Murakami.

In the titular story, Stars of the New Curfew, there are occasional sub-headings. The first is "The Nightmare of Salesmen," in which our narrator explains how his nightmares came about: he sold fake meds to needy people that mostly mad them worse-off. Another section's subheading is "The Salesmen of Nightmares," in which the new wonder drug he's selling causes a wild, placebo fueled fracas on a crowded bus, with a bus driver---on the new drug---racing another driver and sending the bus off a bridge and into a river, drowning seven passengers. After this the narrator flees to his home village, only to encounter the ongoing and escalating feud between the town's two richest families. This 60-plus page story goes all over the place in surprising and enjoyable ways.

I'm waiting for some time to pick up The Famished Road. New post-Modern fiction is always exciting, and from Africa! Hell yes.