Novel
Season of Anomy
Wole Soyinka · 1973
Synopsis
Ofeyi, in charge of publicity for a sugar company, tries to impose on his employers the ideas of Aiyéró, a peasant commune that lives outside the system and without money. The authorities respond with massacres, and the woman who shares his life, Iriyise, disappears, taken away by the regime's men. He sets out to find her across a country given over to killing, from town to town and as far as a fortress prison, with a doctor and a killer as travelling companions.
Context
The book was written after the twenty-two months of detention its author spent during the civil war, where he wrote on cigarette paper and between the lines of the books he was allowed. It takes up the plot of Orpheus in the Underworld and transposes it into a country undone by massacres. The secession, which lasted thirty months, caused between one and three million deaths, many of them from hunger, and the novel appeared three years after its end. Its author had already drawn from those months in a cell an account of his detention, published three years earlier.
Who it is for
A long novel, with dense and allusive language. His plays and his prison memoirs are more accessible.
Prizes and reception
The second of its author's three novels, and the most discussed: critics have been divided between those who see it as a failure and those who read it as a religious and moral book.