You be the judge!

Dear All, I thought I should share with you my impressions of a young Ghanaian writer, Martin Egblewogbe, whose short story collection -- Mr Happy and the Hammer of God -- I have just finished reading. Epithets like "fresh", "imaginative" and "exciting" are often marshalled to introduce new writers, but in the case of Mr Egblewogbe I think a set of strong superlatives are in order; extraordinary, excellent, and experimentally innovative barely capture my sense of what I have read. The short stories each conceal an enigma, sometimes of a profound existential kind, and at others merely due to some form of bafflement on the part of the protagonist of the story. Thus after every story you are required to pause in reflection. This also means the stories are best savoured slowly and one by one. The influence of master spinners of narrative enigmas such as Kafka and Beckett are well in evidence in the collection. What is perhaps most interesting about Mr Happy and the Hammer of God is that Mr Egblewogbe has devised a clever way of telling the stories so to betray only minimal geographical or and other locational markers. There is just one story that can readily be shown to be set in Accra. This form of placelessness thus gives the stories a universal appeal. Ato Quayson, FGA Professor of English and Director Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies