The Famished Road, by Ben Okri

This is another one of those Booker books that didn't do anything for me. It was long--500 pages--and beautifully written, of course, but also completely plotless. Events meandered here and there, with a seemingly endless repetition of "Dad gets beaten up" and "Mom suffers silently" and "strange spirit-child encounters strange spirits." I was severely bored by this plot repetition and meandering, and, what's more, slightly confused at the sheer foreignness of this book: in capturing Nigeria, which of course all the book jacket comments claim Okri did, he captures a world that is utterly alien to me, and indeed much of his reading audience, the world not only of modern Africa but also of spirits and ghosts and witches and wizards who roam freely among the people. Okri has a knack for description and an eye for the magical, but I do wish he'd use those talents in service of a real story, or maybe even real, or at least three-dimensional characters. Sensuous? Yes. Sensual? Yes. Sensical? No.