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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Sep 2005, 336 pages
Paperback:
Oct 2006, 416 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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A mythology for a modern age -- complete with dark prophecy, family dysfunction, mystical deceptions, and killer birds. Not to mention a lime.
Anansi Boys
God is dead. Meet the kids.
When Fat Charlie's dad named something, it stuck. Like calling
Fat Charlie "Fat Charlie." Even now, twenty years later, Charlie
Nancy can't shake that name, one of the many embarrassing "gifts"
his father bestowed -- before he dropped dead on a karaoke stage
and ruined Fat Charlie's life.
Mr. Nancy left Fat Charlie things. Things like the tall,
good-looking stranger who appears on Charlie's doorstep, who
appears to be the brother he never knew. A brother as different
from Charlie as night is from day, a brother who's going to show
Charlie how to lighten up and have a little fun ... just like Dear
Old Dad. And all of a sudden, life starts getting very interesting
for Fat Charlie.
Because, you see, Charlie's dad wasn't just any dad. He was
Anansi, a trickster god, the spider-god. Anansi is the spirit of
rebellion, able to overturn the social order, create wealth out of
thin air, and baffle the devil. Some said he could cheat even
Death himself.
Returning to the territory he so brilliantly explored in his
masterful New York Times bestseller, American Gods, the
incomparable Neil Gaiman offers up a work of dazzling
ingenuity, a kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth that is at once
startling, terrifying, exhilarating, and fiercely funny -- a true
wonder of a novel that confirms Stephen King's glowing assessment
of the author as "a treasure-house of story, and we are lucky to
have him."
Which is Mostly About
Names and Family Relationships
It begins, as most things begin, with a song.
In the beginning, after all, were the words, and they came with a
tune. That was how the world was made, how the void was divided, how
the lands and the stars and the dreams and the little gods and the
animals, how all of them came into the world.
They were sung.
The great beasts were sung into existence, after the Singer had
done with the planets and the hills and the trees and the oceans and
the lesser beasts. The cliffs that bound existence were sung, and the
hunting grounds, and the dark.
Songs remain. They last. The right song can turn an emperor into a
laughing stock, can bring down dynasties. A song can last long after
the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's
...
With a smaller cast of central characters than American Gods, Gaiman is in his element with Anansi Boys. Stories that retell myths are two-a-penny but stories that flow with the gleeful confidence of Anansi Boys are much rarer...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Anansi is one of the gods in West African mythology, sometimes depicted in human form, sometimes as a spider, sometimes as a hybrid. He's tricky, greedy and lustful, but he's also good-hearted, lucky, and although often bad, never evil. The legends are believed to have originated with the Ashanti tribe (from Ghana) but spread through the Akan people (the Akan being a number of different West African tribes linked by a shared language). As the son of Nyame, the sky god, some myths said that Anansi created the sun, the stars and the moon, and
taught mankind how to farm. He is also considered the King of All Stories.
Anansi himself was only caught once, when he was tricked into fighting a tar-baby - and if that story...
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