Anyway, let me tell you about a book a read recently.
Anansi Boys is set in a universe where gods of old take up jobs as travel agents and taxi drivers instead of fading into modern myth. The story follows "Fat" Charlie Nancy, a sheepish Londoner whose dreadful wedding preparations are interrupted when he learns of his father's death in a Florida.
In case you were wondering, Fat Charlie isn't actually fat. The name was given to him by his father, Mr. Nancy, who had a talent for handing out nicknames that stuck. At the funeral, he finds out that his father was Anansi, the African god of stories. He is also told about Spider, his charismatic demigod brother. When Fat Charlie accidentally invites Spider into his London flat, his life becomes tangled up with murderous business men, talking spiders, and angry birds.
What I liked most about Anansi Boys wasn't its merciful length or the way it me made laugh out loud in a quiet room, but its use of west African folklore. Having grown up surrounded by Western art and literature, it's refreshing to read a fantasy novel based on a different history of fairy tales. The book plays with our curiosity about worlds just beyond our veil of reality - places where the beginning of the world and the end of life are just parts of your day. Neil Gaiman himself describes the book as a "magical-horror-thriller-ghost-romantic-comedy-family-epic," and I wouldn't describe it any other way.
Anansi the spider is one of the most important characters of West African and Caribbean folklore. As a trickster, he often uses his wisdom of speech and cunning to turn the table on his foes. The character of Anansi is akin to tricksters Coyote and Raven from Native American cultures and foxes in Asian culture. Anansi's stories, also known as spider stories, were retold mostly through oral tradition and have few modern interpretations. A good number of stories I read carried dark tones, and often had people casually dying and being maimed, much like the old Grimm's fairy tales.
There is a well-known story about how Anansi's name became attached to the corpus of stories. It's definitely worth a watch!
Oh, and the book is worth a read too.
What I liked most about Anansi Boys wasn't its merciful length or the way it me made laugh out loud in a quiet room, but its use of west African folklore. Having grown up surrounded by Western art and literature, it's refreshing to read a fantasy novel based on a different history of fairy tales. The book plays with our curiosity about worlds just beyond our veil of reality - places where the beginning of the world and the end of life are just parts of your day. Neil Gaiman himself describes the book as a "magical-horror-thriller-ghost-romantic-comedy-family-epic," and I wouldn't describe it any other way.
Anansi the spider is one of the most important characters of West African and Caribbean folklore. As a trickster, he often uses his wisdom of speech and cunning to turn the table on his foes. The character of Anansi is akin to tricksters Coyote and Raven from Native American cultures and foxes in Asian culture. Anansi's stories, also known as spider stories, were retold mostly through oral tradition and have few modern interpretations. A good number of stories I read carried dark tones, and often had people casually dying and being maimed, much like the old Grimm's fairy tales.
There is a well-known story about how Anansi's name became attached to the corpus of stories. It's definitely worth a watch!
Oh, and the book is worth a read too.
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