A friend in the writing cult is having a blog tour and giveaway of his “revolutionary” book. So I decided to feature a review of his book today. Read. Comment. And of course, download the book!
For Days And A Night is a collection of short stories by Award winning author Seun Odukoya. Short, punchy and entertaining, the stories comment on issues that we deal with each day-Romance,
relationships, career , family-while employing a generous amount of humour and wit; one that will leave you in a roller coaster of emotions.
Its alternates between happy, sad and melancholy narratives that seductively capture snippets of contemporary life in the metropolitan city of Lagos. There are trips to the cinemas, shopping in the mall, drama in the elevator and so on. The occasional use of pidgin will make it easily appealing to a young audience.
The book starts off in a manner that one recognizes as peculiar to Seun, after reading a few of the stories. The “I” in the prologue IDLE CHATTER is a nameless character who has a story to complete. This Character who narrates in the first person could easily be the author, albeit, this is only an assumption.
It’s 2 am in the morning and the narrator is at his desk in his study. He is in the company of two men who are identified as “Short and daft” and “Tall and dark”. “Short and daft” is annoying and chatty in contrast to “Tall and dark” who comes across as the broody reserved type. The trio chat about the “hood”- this being the narrators residential area – there are not enough girls in the hood. They argue over the narrators love for coffee and his claim that sipping coffee while at his desk by 2 am in the morning makes him feel like a writer. At some point, “Short and daft” gets noisy and “Tall and dark” plays the good chap by asking the narrator to ignore him and focus on completing the story on the laptop in front of him. At this point the narrator’s wife comes down to the study, clad in a “Dark sheer mid-thigh length black nightie” to inquire who her husband is talking to at that time of the day. Here we discover that Seun has played a trick on us. There are no people in the room. “Tall and dark” and “Short and daft” are hallucinatory creations of the narrators troubled mind. It is apparent that this is an ongoing condition; that writing is a therapeutic gate-way through which the narrator seeks to escape. As his wife puts it, the voices in his head are getting louder Continue reading
