Palm-Wine Drinkard
SynopsisPlot
This classic novel tells the phantasmagorical story of an alcoholic man and his search for his dead palm-wine tapster. As he travels through the land of the dead, he encounters a host of supernatural and often terrifying beings - among them the complete gentleman who returns his body parts to their owners and the insatiable hungry-creature.
Story
About this book
The Palm-Wine Drinkard follows a man whose life revolves around drinking palm wine. When his tapster, the only person who can keep up with his enormous thirst, falls from a tree and dies, the drinkard sets out on a long and strange quest to find him in the land of the dead. What begins as a search driven by appetite becomes a wandering passage through places and encounters that draw heavily on Yoruba oral tradition.
Along the way, the drinkard meets figures that feel closer to folklore than to conventional fiction. A gentleman encountered on the road is strikingly handsome, but his borrowed body parts must be returned one by one to their original owners. A creature with limitless hunger threatens everything around it. These episodes arrive in a loose, episodic structure, each one shaped by its own internal logic rather than by the expectations of a Western novel. Tutuola wrote the book in a distinctive English that carries the rhythms and patterns of Yoruba storytelling, and it was first published in 1952.
The novel is set in a landscape where the boundaries between the living and the dead are porous, and ordinary motivations lead into supernatural territory. It is widely regarded as a foundational work of Nigerian literature.
