Choice Review

This fascinating study focuses on Syl Cheney-Coker of Sierra Leone, Kojo Laing of Ghana, and Ben Okri of Nigeria. Cooper (Univ. of Cape Town) argues that through their fiction these writers evoke their culturally complex postcolonial experiences, in which magical and scientific ways of interpreting the world coexist to capture the unity of opposites. The writers ultimately exist somewhere between nationalistic decolonization and a cosmopolitan magical realism. The first third of the text puts magical realism into a larger perspective, examining first the works of Salman Rushdie and several Latin American authors, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Cooper then turns to West Africa to briefly examine D.O. Fugunwa and Amos Tutuola, and then Kwame Anthony Appiah, Chinua Achebe, and Wole Soyinka. Finally, in the most satisfactory section of the book, Cooper discusses in some depth Okri's The Famished Road, Cheney-Coker's The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, and several novels by Laing. These are all works richly imbued with imaginative symbols and images, and Cooper does them and their authors justice. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. C. Pike; University of Minnesota