The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka. New York. 1970. Collier/Macmillan. Collier African /American Library. 276 pages. paperback. 5390.
DESCRIPTION - THEY ARE THE INTERPRETERS - savage, satirical, poetic - caught for an instant on the canvas of time. They are the “now-generation” artists, lawyers, professors, journalists who speak for and of West Africa and her people and the land that was divided before it was Nigeria/Biafra. Drawn together by their color, nation, dissatisfactions, hopes, loves, hates, and the daily lives and deaths around them, four young Nigerian intellectuals evoke and interpret West Africa today. From their wild drinking bouts at the Club Cabana to their individual pursuits of personal and professional integrity, they are the lost and the found generation - simultaneously seekers and prophets as they attempt to define their identity in a world where primitive past and sophisticated present are brought into violent conflict. THE INTERPRETERS combines the uniquely sensitive observations of gifted Wole Soyinka with the kind of mad comedy seen in the works of Donleavy and Pynchon. Here is a book that speaks for modern Africa with universal relevance and irresistible appeal.
In an edition from Heinemann:
The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka. Portsmouth. 1970. Heinemann. 0435900765. African Writers Series. With introduction and notes by Eldred Jones. 260 pages. paperback. AWS76. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover illustration by Colin Williams.
DESCRIPTION - The Interpreters is concerned with a group of young Nigerian intellectuals trying to make something worthwhile of their lives and talents in a society where corruption and consequent cynicism, social climbing and conforming give them alternative cause for despair and laughter. It is elaborately, strikingly and indeed often beautifully written.' The Times. ‘ . . . passages that crackle up into risible scenes of social comedy.' The Observer. 'a great steaming marsh of a novel... brimful of promise and life.' New Statesman. 'The first African novel that has a texture of real complexity and depth.' Gerald Moore in The New African. Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He is the first African winner in the Prize's history. When he heard the news, he said, 'This prize is recognition of our culture and our traditions in Africa, and I am very glad about it. This is his first novel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Akinwande Oluwole 'Wole' Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian playwright and poet. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African to be honored. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. After study in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its struggle for independence from Great Britain. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967 during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years. Soyinka has strongly criticised many Nigerian military dictators, especially late General Sanni Abacha, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with 'the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it'. During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–98), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria via the 'Nadeco Route' on a motorcycle. Living abroad, mainly in the United States, he was a professor first at Cornell University and then at Emory University in Atlanta, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Abacha proclaimed a death sentence against him 'in absentia'. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation. He has also taught at the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Yale. From 1975 to 1999, he was a Professor of Comparative Literature at the Obafemi Awolowo University, then called the University of Ife. With civilian rule restored in 1999, he was made professor emeritus. Soyinka has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In the fall of 2007 he was appointed Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, US.
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