Nigerian poet, playwright, and novelist Ben Okri (Prayer for the Living; Dangerous Love) won the 1991 Booker Prize for The Famished Road, a lengthy novel noted for its singular style. Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted is slimmer, plunging readers into a dizzying masquerade where little is as it appears to be.
By combining the fantastical elements of A Midsummer Night's Dream with allusions to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," Okri creates a world that feels lush while exposing the barren landscapes--both physical and emotional--of modern humanity. Though Viv and Beatrice (and their husbands, Alan and Stephen) are British, the bulk of the story takes place in an enchanted forest in France, where Viv is holding "a festival for people who've been smashed up by love." Central to both the real and the magical elements is the famed fortune-teller Madame Sosostris, who agrees to attend Viv's festival and promises those who visit "La Fôret Sacrée" will be transformed.
Divided into four books, each with short, dialogue-heavy chapters, Madame Sosostris often reads like a play. Many of the exchanges have a sharp, almost caustic nature, putting one in mind of the absurdities of Tom Stoppard. Punctuating these moments, however, are beautiful descriptive passages and thoughtful evaluations of culture and society, pointing up the ways people will hide behind the public faces they have created. Okri, like Madame Sosostris herself, invites readers to be transformed, to recognize that "Being rejected, abandoned, makes us human," but "it is only among the broken that you find those with the humility and the vision to create a new world." --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian