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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gorgeous myth-making, 2 Jun 2008
A remarkable fairy tale, the legend of a lost time and a lost people, elevating an unnamed African kingdom and an unknowable tribe of artists to the heights of myth. Okri's facility here with language rivals Rushdie or Nabokov at their most luminous, and makes the novel a joyous reading experience. His insights into the minds of his characters, or the vital importance of art, or the epiphanic nature of stillness and silence, are rendered in words that slow down the eye and the mind, that force the reader to examine how the beauty of such language embeds in the mind the story being told for long after the last page is turned over.
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9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A 'magical' tale that failed to enchant me, 25 Aug 2007
This is the second novel by Okri that I have tried to read. After waiting for quite a few years to pass, I was hoping that this time around I would be dazzled by him. STARBOOK seemed to be the one that could keep my attention. Described as being about a prince and a maiden who are both "tested by trials in a mythical land where art, initiation and dynamic stillness are supremely important" and set within an idyllic world providing rich prose. Sounded fantastic, yet upon starting the novel I was hugely disappointed.
Okri is one of those writers you either love or desperately want to love. I tried to love this book, but it failed to make me sit down and read for hour into hour. Although he has created a mythical land where beauty sits next to monstrosity, Okri's writing missed a crucial ingredient. I cannot even pretend to know what this is - all I know is that, as I read his words, whilst I could often see the beauty behind them, they also had the ability to wash over me without truly engaging me. Despite there being occassions where I would marvel over his talent for writing something profound and intriguing, there were too many times that I felt the opposite; that his wise words were trying too hard, making the novel seem pretentious and affecting the flow of the work.
One of the sections which I was struck by, was the description of the prince observing a heron. The prince described the bird as majestic, as it was able to make itself seem more plain than it truly was, so as not to draw unwanted attention to itself:
"It was a royal creature that understood that to survive in the world you must not overly dazzle out your brilliance, otherwise you wouldn't catch true fish, and you would be hunted for your beauty" (p.34).
After trying to allow this book's magic to work itself on me for 4 days, and only being able to progress to page 55, I finally admitted defeat. For me, Okri's style hugely let this magical piece fail to even spark a true interest deep within me. Not for want of trying, but I had to finally leave this book unread.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Why use one word when you can use a hundred?, 13 Mar 2008
There's probably a good story in Okri's Starbook. It certainly has some wonderfully surreal moments, and some touching ones too. But it's Worthy... oh, so very Worthy. There's one whole chapter devoted to one of the main characters thanking everyone - and everything - and we have to read about every single thank you in brain-dribbling detail. Why? Why!?
After Starbook, I read Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone. The contrast was telling: here was someone who knew how to fit a lot into single sentences. I'm not saying authorship should be about cutting. But it should be about the magic of language, and more often than not, that magic comes when a writer has written and re-written until we're left with the core of their meaning. Okri is saying something very powerful in Starbook; it's just such a shame he felt it unnecessary to strive for the pith.
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