Amos Tutuola, "The Complete Gentleman" (Nigeria)

It’s December 7. Welcome back to the 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar—a literary globetrotting adventure featuring 25 stories from 25 different countries.

Our editor, Alberto Manguel, is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

Here he is on Amos Tutuola’s story, “The Complete Gentleman”:

The case of Amos Tutuola is unique in the history of English literature. There are cases of foreign writers adopting English late in life and becoming master stylists in a language that is not their mother tongue: Conrad and Nabokov are two obvious examples. But Amos Tutuola went further. He was educated in an English school but never quite abandoned his native Yoruba. Instead, he began to write stories and novels drawn from the collective imagination of his people in an English that is certainly not that of English schoolbooks, but is enriched by strange turns of phrase and an idiosyncratic grammar and spelling that the reader can follow easily and that constantly surprises by its novelty, rich as that of Sir Thomas Browne and whimsical as that of Lawrence Sterne.

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