If you are familiar with Amos Tutuola’s works, this should be on your list because this is who Tutuola learned from. First published in 1939 (and translated by Wole Soyinka), this is a fundamental work in the Nigerian canon—indeed, perhaps the single most famous work in all of Nigerian literature. It explores the world of Yoruba myth by narrating the ”adventures” of Akara-ogun. The story is a quest, an allegory, a search for meaning and it is a true tour de force. (You can find the first thirty pages or so online, courtesy of City Lights Books, the indispensable San Francisco bookstore.) (P.S. For those who are put off by Tutuola's "style"--as I will often confess to being--this is much more straightforward, comprehensible, and--dare I say--enjoyable.) ( )

An entertaining read, but very primitive. I don't just mean that in a racist sense, calling an African work "uncivilized." It's also primal. Reads very much like a directionless dream or myth, straight out of the collective unconscious. I am embarrassed to say how impressed I am at the similarities between Yoruba and Western lit. ( )

Reading books in translation sometimes feels a little like looking at pictographs from an ancient culture. The entire carved wall thrums with meaning, the sensitive, curious reader can feel it. But for the visitor from another culture and another time, so much remains inaccessible, opaque. What doesn't, what bleeds through, remains shimmery and translucent, so that one can never really be confident that the story heard is the one that was intended.

Wole Soyinka talks a little about this problem in his translator's note at the beginning of this book, The Forest of a Thousand Daemons:

"...this phrase 'mo nmi ho bi agiliti' which became "my breath came in rapid bloats like the hawing of a toad" aroused some protest from a critic. Indeed agiliti is far from being a toad, it is more a member of the lizard species. But then neither toad nor lizard is the object of action or interest to the hero Akaraogun or his creator Fagunwa at this point in the narration Fagunwa's concern is to convey the vivid sense of event, and a translator must select equivalents for mere auxiliaries where these serve the essential purpose better than the precise original.

...So not only are we reading a tale written for another culture, but written in another language and retold to us in words that sometimes mean things quite different from what the storyteller really said. Soyinka's explains why he felt it was so important to translate the word Irunmale in the title (Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale) as "daemons" instead of the usual "devils," or "gods" or "demons," even though any of these three would be more "literal" and accurate. He offers a lamentation for the way English words can't convey the right "sounds," the way Fagunwa's carefully-chosen Yoruba words do, and how therefore the music of the story utterly lost.

But perhaps not as lost as all that. This is a modern novel, after all. The first novel to be written in the Yoruba language, and thus of immense influence for later Nigerian writers, but Fagunwa is no ancient shaman relating old and sacred myths. He is an English-educated Nigerian, an alumni of St. Andrew's College in Oyo--the premier educational institution in Nigeria-- giving a voice to his own culture as it becomes infiltrated and transformed by modern influences. It might not be so out of bounds to see in the novel the shades of other stories from more familiar traditions.

The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, then, is an odyssey story, told in a storyteller's cadence, with a storyteller's toolbox of traditional folk themes and fairy tales to build upon.

The book begins with a plea from the storyteller:

"My friends all, like the sonorous proverb do we drum the agidigbo*; it is the wise who dance to it, and the learned who understand its language. The story which follows is a veritable agidigbo; it is I who will drum it, and you the wise heads who will interpret it."

It is a call to the listener and the reader -- asking us to not just passively listen or read, but to take part in the tale, to be Akara-ogun, perhaps. To hear the story as if it were happening to us.

If folk tales are the primary colors in the writer's paint box, Fagunwa is an acknowledged master at color, hue and shade. The hunter-hero, Akara-ogun, goes into the forest of Irunmale, has adventures, outwits enemies, kills monsters, escapes capture, meets spirit creatures who sometimes become benefactors (One is a beautiful woman named "Help-meet") and returns home, sometimes wiser, sometimes richer, sometimes in sorrow. The stories are vivid, and sometimes frightening. Like Odysseus, or Hercules, each new adventure seems to tease the reader with a whispered meaning, and one gets the growing sense after every strange event that the trials of Akara-ogun aren't adventure stories, but morality tales.

In fact, there is an undercurrent to all of Akara-ogun's adventures...a tension between old ways and new beliefs...between traditional superstitions and modern religious doctrines. Between "the forest" and "heaven." One full of wily daemons, one full of wise angels. A hunter like Akara-ogun must learn to navigate both. He uses both spells and prayers, magic and faith. And while it is clear Fagunwa thinks that faith in God is the most powerful of weapon in a hunter's bag of tricks, the magic of the daemons that infest the forest can't be dismissed.

*agidigbo: Yoruba leisurely music played mostly at social gatherings

How varied are the daemons that inhabit this forest! Supernatural beings that are part human and part animal, some that are tiny and some that are enormous, some with diverse numbers of body parts, some that are truly vile, and some that can carry out all sorts of magic, for both good and evil. The first novel written in Yoruban, this book is said to have had a great influence on later Nigerian writers; it was translated into English by Wole Soyinka who wrote a very interesting Translator's Note at the beginning of the edition I read.

The novel is in two parts, but both are told by the hunter Akara-ogun to an audience that includes the "author" and that grows with each installment. In the first part, Akara-ogun, whose name means Compound-of-Spells and whose father was also a hunter and "a great one for medicine and spells" and whose mother was a witch, tells the tale of his two trips to the Irunmale Forest, the forest of a thousand daemons, and the adventures and misadventures that he encountered there as he met the varied denizens of the forest. He often had to confront dangerous and magical opponents, and several times was rescued by magical spells. While horrifying and nightmarish at times, Fagunwa's descriptions of the daemons in their infinite variety is utterly compelling, as are some of the characters Akara-ogun meets.

In the second part, Akara-ogun, tells the tale of how he, along with other hunters of his kingdom, is sent by the king on a dangerous mission to Mount Langbodo. Here too they encounter dangers along the route, including more daemons and wild beasts, but when they arrive the nature of the book changes and the hunters listen to lectures on how to be a moral person, told largely through illustrative tales.

I found it hard to understand the two parts of this book as a whole, but I can see in a metaphorical way that it is looking at how people confront what it means to be a human being, both literally and psychologically. The book was originally published in 1939 when Nigeria was still very much a British colony, so I think Fagunwa is also obliquely commenting on what it means to be an African in a world controlled by others. As noted above, his use of the Yoruban language, and of Yoruban folk tales and cosmology, was hugely influential.

My City Lights edition was enhanced by illustrations by Bruce Onobrakepya; one of them is on the cover.