SOURCE: Dasenbrock, Reed Way. Review of Ìsarà: A Voyage around Essay, by Wole Soyinka. World Literature Today 64, no. 3 (summer 1990): 517-18.

In the following review, Dasenbrock explores the parallels between Aké: The Years of Childhood—the memoir of Soyinka's youth—and Ìsarà: A Voyage around Essay—the biography of Soyinka's father.

It would seem absurd to call Wole Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize and one of the two or three African writers whose name everyone knows, an underappreciated writer, and indeed on the evidence of his recent verse collection Mandela's Earth, one would have to call him an overappreciated poet. Critical assessment of Soyinka has been centered on his plays, however (and, to a lesser extent, on his poetry), and this has meant that he is underappreciated in one respect: as a writer of prose. He is the author of two novels—The Interpreters and Season of Anomy...