Novels
Oyono's novels were written in French in the late 1950s and were only translated into English a decade or two afterward.
Among his works are:
- Une vie de boy (1956; translated as Houseboy in 1966), a diary-form novel that criticized the morality of colonialism
- Le Vieux Nègre et la médaille (1956; translated as The Old Man and the Medal in 1969)
- Chemin d'Europe (1960; translated as Road to Europe in 1989)
Read more about this topic: Ferdinand Oyono
Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“Fathers and Sons is not only the best of Turgenev’s novels, it is one of the most brilliant novels of the nineteenth century. Turgenev managed to do what he intended to do, to create a male character, a young Russian, who would affirm his—that character’s—absence of introspection and at the same time would not be a journalist’s dummy of the socialistic type.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)