Anansi Boys

by Neil Gaiman

Paperback, 2006

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Collection

Publication

HarperTorch (2006), 416 pages

Description

Fiction. HTML: When Fat Charlie's dad named something, it stuck. Like calling Fat Charlie "Fat Charlie." Even now, 20 years later, Charlie Nancy can't shake that name, one of the many embarrassing "gifts" his father bestowed-before he dropped dead on a karaoke stage and ruined Fat Charlie's life. Because Mr. Nancy left Fat Charlie things. Things like the tall, good-looking stranger who appears on Charlie's doorstep, who appears to be the brother he never knew. A brother as different from Charlie as night is from day, a brother who's going to show Charlie how to lighten up and have a little fun. And all of a sudden, things start getting very interesting for Fat Charlie. Exciting, scary, and deeply funny, Anansi Boys is a kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth, a wild adventure, as Neil Gaiman shows us where gods come from, and how to survive your family..… (more)

Media reviews

Gaiman kutoo tapansa mukaan sujuvan ja houkuttelevan kertomuksen, joka ammentaa tarinoiden ja myyttien maailmasta. Sujuvan lukukokemuksen viimeistelee onnistunut suomennos. Gaimaniin mieltyneille Hämähäkkijumala on puolipakollinen kirjahyllyn täyte ja kevytfantasiaa hakeville ihan yhtä hyvä
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tutustumiskirja kuin mikä tahansa varhaisempi romaani. Vaikka kirjan juoni ei juuri yllätäkään, Gaiman esittelee tarinankertojan lahjaansa: kykyä tehdä mahdottomasta todenmakuista.
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And Charlie, who has become a successful singer and fathered a son, has come to terms with the powers and responsibilities of ''a boy who was half a god," having learned what Gaiman knows better, and communicates more forcefully, than any other contemporary writer: Stories and poems, songs and
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myths, represent us, sustain and complete us, and survive us, while also ensuring that all that's best in us survives with them.
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The focus on Anansi and tricksters, I think, goes a long way towards explaining the tone of this novel. It really feels more like some of the established "funny" sci-fi/fantasy authors (like Gaiman's Good Omens co-author Terry Pratchett) than "classic" Neil.
The problem in "Anansi Boys" is the type of fantasy Gaiman has chosen. The tales of Anansi outwitting his foes leave you feeling you've eaten something heavy and sugary. There's an Uncle Remus folksiness to the stories that sends the airy blitheness of the farce plummeting down to earth. There is
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also, I regret to say, the warm hand of instruction lying uneasily on this tale. Charlie works through his ineffectualness and his family issues to find happiness, contentment and - ugh - acceptance. It leaves you with the uncomfortable feeling that for Gaiman, farce by itself would simply have been too frivolous, that he feels the need to impart a lesson.
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Anansi Boys contains a couple of traditional-style Anansi fables, and the book itself takes a similar ambling but wry, pointed tone; like any good Anansi story, it's about cleverness, appetite, and comeuppance, and it's funny in a smart, inclusive way. And like any good Gaiman book, it's about the
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places where the normal world and a fantastic one intersect, and all the insightful things they have to say about each other.
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This book being a product of Gaiman's eat-all-the-soft-centres-at-once mind, Anansi Boys keeps flitting magically around the world. The brothers do riffs on African stories, play farcical games, and make funny observations.
"Anansi Boys" is a hybrid of folk tale and farce that freely partakes of the comic wealth in each, slipping effortlessly back and forth between them.
With Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman's delightful, funny and affecting new novel, the bestselling author has scored the literary equivalent of a hole in one, employing the kind of self-assured storytelling that makes it all look so easy.
It isn't quite Gaiman Lite, but if Mark Twain could be channeled through an Englishman's prism, it might very well emerge as this singsong reverie, narrated by some karaoke-induced Huckleberry Finn.
It's a giddy but somewhat unsatisfying ride. Whenever Gaiman runs into a narrative jam, he veers off in an exhilarating new direction, a diversionary tactic that starts to feel like a cheat. In his gravity-free fictional universe, nothing he has to say seems to carry any weight.
However, having said all that, it's still Neil Gaiman, it's yet another enchanting bit of word-wizardry by one of the premier wordsmiths of our times, and it's still a damned fine read. It's just that, for this reader, it feels a little like having walked out of the ocean that was American Gods and
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somehow finding myself cooling my toes in a paddling pool.
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Neil Gaiman's AMERICAN GODS presented a modern look at ancient gods that left fans wanting more about the characters. Gaiman's ANANSI BOYS focuses on the ancient African spider-god Anansi the Trickster. Narrator Lenny Henry has one of those great British voices that is always interesting. His
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perfect use of Caribbean accents and strange animalistic human voices is a joy. The story of the sons of Anansi, one with god-like powers and the other human, is compelling. Gaiman offers a twist that alone makes the story worthwhile. One amusing aspect is that one of Henry's characters, a bird-woman, sounds exactly like Yoda from STAR WARS.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member PghDragonMan
Stephen King wants to be Neil Gaiman when he grows up.

Neil Gaiman shows a knack for taking mythology and folklore and bringing it into this world. With Anansi Boys, Gaiman brings Anansi, the trickster spider of African and Caribbean folklore to life. As with other classical mythology figures, we
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find that near immortals and mortals mix. It seems that this Anansi took a mortal wife and she had a son, or is it two sons, by him and that is who the story is really about.

The story is enjoyable for a number of reasons. If you are a fan of traditional folktales, you probably know of Anansi. Gaiman does a nice job of relating some Anansi stories you may not be familiar with and showing how these stories became transformed into Americanized folk tales. He also fashions a modern adaptation and, continuing the theme from American Gods, Gaiman posits that old gods are still among us if you know how to approach them.

True to the Anansi stories that Gaiman draws on to give us this story, Anansi Boys is a parable. In this case, the moral is the dual nature of our selves and how we must strive to keep balance within our selves. Charles Nancy is the first son of Anansi we meet. We later meet his brother, Spider. Still later we are lead to believe that Charles and Spider were once the same person and Spider was drawn off from Charles. Spider the archetypical trickster, always walking on the edge of getting in trouble, getting what he wants by tricking people and in general, living the good life at he expense of others. Charles is the antithesis of Spider, very down to earth without a devious thought in his mind.

Enter two other characters, both female and both opposites. Rosie, a proper young lady, betrothed to Charles, and Daisy, a fun loving, but still sensible young woman with a distinct wild side. Just as Charles and Spider are actually counterparts to each other, these two women play a counter balance to the two main men of the story. Through these characters we learn about balancing our natures. While it is not hard to figure out who ends up paired with whom, the story lies in how it happens.

While American Gods was decidedly a heavy story, Anansi Boys, like the Anansi tales themselves, is at times side splitting funny, with just enough danger and suspense thrown in to keep you rooted to the tale so you learn the message of the parable. In Neverwhere, except for the obvious comic relief, I don’t think the story was meant to come off as much of a comedy. I have a hard time imagining Anansi Boys was ever intended to be anything but humorous.

An all around great story, well written and, in the case of the audio book, well told. The only problem I have is trying to decide just how high to rate this. I do not feel it is truly a five star story because it did not exactly rock my world. Nonetheless, I still found this more enjoyable than the previous Gaiman stories that I’d given four and a half stars to. Since we do not have a four and three-quarters star rating, I’m going four and a half for this one. Just imagine that the rating really says 9½ out of 10 and the others are 9 out of 10.
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LibraryThing member karieh
For me, “Anansi Boys” was one third Douglas Adams, one third Robert Rankin, one third Jasper Fforde and one third Neil Gaiman. (I know, but it’s that kind of book.)

There’s the “wacky things happen when you least expect it, but roll with it” aspect that I always enjoy. An ordinary
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bedroom in a London flat can suddenly seem the size of a football field with a different view out the window than what is really there, one person can be seen as a completely different person even to those who know him best, and there are gods walking the earth. Supernatural meeting the mundane with witty banter along the way.

I certainly wouldn’t say this is one of my favorite books of this type – but it was an enjoyable read. I picked it up mostly because I recognized Gaiman’s name from Coraline which my kids saw and liked. Based on that frame of reference that I had, this book was NOTHING like that. Which is fine. Oh, but before I go further, I should mention that the main character’s name is Fat Charlie.

“Fat Charlie tried to remember what people did in prison to pass the time, but all he could come up with was keeping secret diaries and hiding things in their bottoms. He had nothing to write on, and felt that a definite measure of how well one was getting on in life was not having to hide things in one’s bottom.”

It’s an interesting story with colorful characters as Fat Charlie discovers the world behind the one he had been inhabiting all his life. He has a good set of eyes with which the reader can see this unusual world, and sometimes his vision provides the reader with more than one might expect.

“Different creatures have different eyes. Human eyes (unlike, say, a cat’s eyes, or an octopus’s) are only made to see one version of reality at a time. Fat Charlie saw one thing with his eyes, and he saw something else with his mind, and in the gulf between the two things, madness waited. He could feel a wild panic welling up inside him, and he took a deep breath and held it in while his heart thudded against his ribcage. He forced himself to believe his eyes, not his mind.”

Fat Charlie is the definition of everyman, plodding along through life until he is forced to learn more about his father and his newly discovered brother, Spider.

“If he (Spider) had not been perfectly certain of his own sanity, certain to a degree that normally is found only in people who have concluded that they’re definitely Julius Caesar and have been sent to save the world, he might have thought he was going mad.”

I guess, in the end, I enjoyed this book but didn’t love it. I liked Gaiman’s easy writing style and most of the supernatural goofiness and found several of the parts to be funny in a gentle way.

“Charlie pushed his fedora back onto his head. Some hats can only be worn if you’re willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you’re only a step away from dancing. They demand a lot of you. This hat was one of those, and Charlie was up to it.”

Charlie, who somewhere along the way, stopped being Fat Charlie and became a man of his own. With a jaunty hat.
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LibraryThing member riverwillow
Fat Charlie Nancy is just an fairly ordinary bloke, with run of the mill problems, such as how to get his fiancee, Rosie, to sleep with him before their wedding. That is until his father dies and he asks a spider to find his long lost brother. Then all hell breaks loose and Charlie learns that
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there is much more to life than he had, and in the process loses his embarrassment with himself and learns and that birds are not always nice. I love how Gaiman takes the ordinary world and makes it extraordinarily scary and funny all at the same time. He has a nice way of writing too. 'the beast made the noise of a cat being shampooed, a lonely wail of horror and outrage, of shame and defeat.' Wonderful.
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LibraryThing member Terpsichoreus
One can catch snips of wit in any of Gaiman's books. Any good book must include some humor: an author might as futilely try to excise pain or desire from life as humor. Gaiman has never placed any such artificial limits on his work; indeed, the only limits on his books are those he, himself cannot
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overcome.

Previously, his humor was only an occasional element, but there was apparently something in the writing of this particular book which finally allowed him to unleash his sense of the comic as a whole entity. The text swims and bobs with the ridiculous, the unfortunate, and the clever.

After reading the book 'Good Omens', written by Gaiman and Prachett, I was told that without Prachett, it would have retained none of the humor. I now begin to wonder whether Prachett's only addition to that book was the predictable and banal snatches which so fill his discworld books. Indeed, this work of Gaiman's overshadows that earlier work in both degrees and shades of the insightful and entertaining.

The book also works as an amusing analysis of storytelling itself, so that anyone who studies the nature and classification of tales will find certain asides and references particularly amusing. It is rare these days that an author will write a piece of fiction which explores on a subtextual level a concept or idea fundamental to the work itself. I have come to wish that more authors could gain the audacity that Gaiman found here.

There is a degree to which this story matches Gaiman's usual monomythic progression from naive outsider to coy insider, which at the outset was my greatest difficulty with the work. The inevitability and redundancy of this trope makes me wish for Gaiman's more eccentric and perverse moments. However, I found in the clever and skilled text a story worth experiencing, and one which matches or exceeds Gaiman's other attempts in the modern fantasy genre.

The story is not as epic or dire as Gaiman's tend to be, and without that there is a loss of urgency in the story. This is not really a deficiency, however, as the playful humor could not cohabitate comfortably with an ever-steepening plot curve.

The work fits into Gaiman's usual mode, exploring the myths and psychologies that most interest him. It may lose some of his fans in that it is less dark and brooding, less hopeless, but this could hardly be counted a loss. Any reader who wants more of the same can re-read his old works. the rest of us may appreciate seeing a master storyteller exploring his form in a new and engaging way.
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LibraryThing member KathyWoodall
Fat Charlie had always been a little embarrassed by his father. His father thought it was great fun to play practical jokes on him. Once when Fat Charlie was just a kid his father told him that if he went to school on Presidents Day dressed as his favorite president he would get a bag of candy and
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be the most popular kid in school. When Charlie confronted his dad after practically been laughed out of school his dad just laughed.

Charlie’s fiance talks him into inviting his dad to their wedding. When Charlie calls he finds out his dad has died. While singing karaoke in a night club he suffers a fatal heart attack and dies’ but, not before though pulling down a woman’s tube top and exposing her to everyone.
After the funeral Charlie is told 2 very important things about his dad. The first one is, he has a brother he never knew about. Second his father was a god.

When Charlie asks how to get a hold of this so called brother he is told to talk to a spider. He does just that. Not long after his brother shows up at his apartment door. He gets more than he bargain's for with his brother. Spider turns poor Charlie’s life upside down.

Very humorous and a fun story to read. An off beat comedy of 2 brothers learning that their dad truly was a god.
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LibraryThing member queencersei
Fat Charlie Nancy is an ordinary guy, living an ordinary life in London. Stuck in a miserable accounting job run by a thief and married to an ordinary girl named Rosie, who has a horrible mother, Fat Charlie seems content enough with life. Finding out that his estranged father has died back in
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Florida, Fat Charlie ends up meeting Spider, the brother he never knew he had. Spider quickly decides that he doesn’t mind Fat Charlie’s life either and decides to take it over. A decision that takes Fat Charlie down a rabbit hole filled with alternate planes of reality, an encounter with an aggrieved Tiger, a mentally unstable bird woman and a little crime fighting in the Caribbean. Anansi Boys is a funny, fantastical read that is long on imagination.
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LibraryThing member libraryofus
(Amy) A sort-of sequel to American Gods, Anansi Boys is perhaps lighter in tone, but no less substantial to my mind. (It should be noted that some people disagree with me on this.) In it Fat Charlie slowly becomes aware that the father he has just buried might in fact be something slightly
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different than the lazy layabout he'd always thought. In fact, Fat Charlie learns all sorts of things about his family that he'd never known...
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LibraryThing member PhoebeReading
Anansi Boys is the semi-sequel to one of my all time favorites, American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Gaiman again combines the fantastics of mythology with strongly rendered modern characters and a clear, joyful narration. The focus of Anansi Boys is more narrow than the preceding volume; here, Gaiman
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focuses entirely on the West African figure of Anansi, and he does a good job capturing the mischievousness and liveliness of that oral tradition and melding it with a more modern father-son tale.I listened to Anansi Boys rather than reading it on a long car trip from Florida to New Jersey. Lenny Henry's reading style is amazing, and he uses a variety of voices to perfectly capture the personalities of many of the characters, from the elderly Mrs. Dunwitty to sly Spider to sheepish everyman Charlie. Though he sometimes lets these voices and personas spill over into the narration, we can hardly fault him for this when he creates such amicable and appealing portraits otherwise. His lively reading really buoys the tale through a middle section that drags; I suspect Gaiman alone would have lost me.But despite the sagging center, the novel's introduction and conclusion are truly riveting, and the characters almost insanely appealing. Gaiman's done a good job here, and this is a worthy follow up to the equally excellent American Gods.ETA: I almost never address complaints about books that other reviewers make in my reviews, but, yes, the majority of characters in this novel are black and no, Neil Gaiman does not make a big deal about it because, while their cultural backgrounds/traditions are relevant, their color is not. If you had trouble even guessing that the son of a West African god would be black, then that was rather oblique of you, wasn't it? And if you were so distracted by the subtly stated references to race, then, shame on you for completely missing the point.
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LibraryThing member gilroy
Wow. This book doesn't even rank in the bottom ten worst books ever. Its below that. Not quite as bad as Spider Legs, but still rather pitiful. The first chapter has so many confusing paragraphs, I had difficulty enjoying the book. The story could have been narrowed down to a short story without
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harm, because it would cut worthless author asides which threw me out of the story. I could not recommend this book to anyone else.
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LibraryThing member ladycato
I read American Gods a few years ago and found the concept interesting, but never connected to the characters. I was told at the time, Anansi Boys was better.

Yes and no.

Gaiman is a brilliant writer, no question, but for several reasons this book didn't connect for me. The characters are fully
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realized, yet the main characters--Fat Charlie and Spider--are rather unlikeable. Fat Charlie is a hapless everyman, and Spider is every bit a trickster god's son. Following Fat Charlie is a bit like watching an episode of The Flintstones, where you know Fred will do something stupid, and all you can do is cringe. The plot threads also come together in a bizarrely tidy way at the end.

I appreciate the writing, but this book just isn't a keeper for me.
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LibraryThing member pauljessup
Not anywhere near as good as American Gods, and not anywhere near as funny as Good Omens. Most of the jokes fell flat, as well as most of the characters. Felt more like a bad buddy-comedy film and less like a Gaiman novel.
LibraryThing member MrsLee
I find this world of Gaiman's to be perfectly believable. A seamless blend of reality and fantasy, difficult not to believe; he must have written it with very strong conviction. One of my favorite things about the way Gaiman writes, is the way he builds his characters. In the beginning, you aren't
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really sure you even like them, but by the end there is such a force of personality, and he has brought you so deeply into their world that you care deeply about what happens. I love the telling of this story, it seems faithful to the telling of the Anansi stories. There were times when I laughed and times when I cringed. All in all, a very satisfying tale which I wouldn't mind reading again.
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LibraryThing member SaraPrindiville
Much better written than his earlier work. I really like him because of his obsession with gods. You can see why he was a comic book writer. He didn't explore Anansi's trickery enough, but I did like his ventures into folktale styles. I was not bored in the least.
LibraryThing member lunule


The audiobook was an awesome performance.
LibraryThing member AJBraithwaite
Enjoyable mix of mythology, detective story and character development. Better than American Gods because it didn't have the cringe-making sex scenes.
LibraryThing member Alliebadger
This book was FANTASTIC. I've never read American Gods, although I think this book is related to it, and I plan on picking it up in the future. The basic plot is that Fat Charlie Nancy (who has been called Fat Charlie his whole life because his father once called him that and it stuck) has just
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found out his father died. He was always mortified by his father, but he finds out so much more--his father was the spider trickster god Anansi, and apparently he has a brother he never knew existed. Now with all of this magic and embarrassment in his life, he has to sort everything out and maybe put his life back together.

Gaiman's quirky humor shines through in this novel. All of the separate story threads sparkle on their own, but by the end they are dazzling as they weave together to make his spider web of a story. It is a beautifully crafted, laugh-out-loud novel that you should definitely pick up.
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LibraryThing member Narshkite
A wonderfully fun read. Gods, romance, sibling rivalry, embarassing parents, fiancial fraud, annoying airline travel, its all in here. I listened to this book, and the reader, Lenny Henry, was fantastic. If you like audio books I heartily recommend this one.
LibraryThing member lmichet
Some people might prefer American Gods, with that epic tone, but I prefer Anansi Boys, and not just because it's entertaining and lighthearted, but because it seems to have been pulled off much more smoothly. Finally, Gaiman is writing about someone more like himself than Shadow was- a person who
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lives in England having adventures in America. Though Fat Charlie is American by origin, he's very British, and I guess that just made it easier for Gaiman because he took it and ran with it and everything was simply fantastic. It also feels a lot more like he's actually writing about the America I know.
In its way, this book is just as stunningly creative as American Gods. The animal-people who represent the ancient African gods are excellent--- especially, of course, Tiger. Just as creative are the characters, who are much easier to care for than any of the ones in Gods. They get into hopelessly awkward situations and seem so real that you can't help but be on their side. Even the villain is likable, in a nasty sort of way.
Finally, these modern-fantasy-splotched-in-alongside-the-real-world books are simply my favorite kind of fantasy novel. You can't get away with high fantasy anymore, really. The genre's been done to death over the last fifty years, and unless we want to tire it out completely, there are a bunch of authors who might want to give it a rest. Much more enjoyable, to me, are the fantasy novels that manage to be straight-up fantasy without having elves or castles or swords of any kind in them-- they're often ten times as creative, much fresher, and a lot more fun to read. Other books like this, from both youth and adult fiction, include Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones, the not-quite-fantasy-but-silly-enough-to-count Thursday Next and Jack Spratt novels by Jasper Fforde, and, on a slightly different note, the Terry Pratchett Discworld series, which takes every sentence and uses it to make fun of high fantasy and, more recently, of modern daily life. The Watch mini-series within the greater Discworld canon is particularly good at this-- I would call it Urban Fantasy, actually.
At any rate, I simply liked Anansi Boys a lot more than American Gods. It felt like a runner who'd had time to stretch the legs a bit and get into a rhythm.
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LibraryThing member BookJumper
Typically, I am one to wait a few years between readings of the same book. Not so with this: as soon as I finished it, I dived back into the beginning and re-read the whole first half, eager to increase my understanding and appreciation of the work. It withstood the test: masterfully constructed,
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"Anansy Boys" is littered with apparently innocuous images, clues, snippets that, re-read in the light of the ending, make you go "aaaaaaaaaah yes I get it now". For exactly the same reason, some people have called it "predictable"; and maybe it is, plot-line wise, but no matter: it's beautifully written, filled with characters you really feel for (in both good and bad ways), contains quite a few funny moments, not to mention that - for once - it is good to see people get what they deserve.
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LibraryThing member snat
A Digression and a Review:

When I was a child who was much too prone to being serious for her own good, there was a catalpa tree in our backyard. Now, if you don't know what a catalpa tree is, it's worth a Google. Catalpas are beautiful and exotic, with giant leaves we used as "plates" to have
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fairy-like meals of mulberry and honeysuckle (with mimosa blossoms as a bit of garnish), giant bean pods that hung down like sylvan fingers ready to ensnare an unsuspecting child, white orchid-like flowers that would shower down while we swung on the tire swing below. In its boughs, I could pretend to be Pocahontas, a female Mowgli, or Jana of the Jungle. I would climb up and look down to the ground so far below, filled with delicious terror at how impossibly high I was. This tree seemed massive--big enough to hold all of my dreams and wildest flights of fancy. It, to paraphrase Zora Neale Hurston, seemed to hold dawn and doom in its branches.

As an adult, however, this tree that looms so gargantuan in my imaginary landscape seems small and shrunken, like a wizened grandparent, its limbs not so big, and I realize that, while I felt like I was climbing to the top of a skyscraper, I was barely 10 feet off the ground.

I bring this up because this is the closest approximation I can make to the difference between reading as a child and reading as an adult. As a child, there was a magic in stories, and I'm not talking about pixie dust and wands (although there was certainly some of that). There was a magic in not knowing (or caring) where a story was going. A magic to realizing why, hey, that main character is kind of like me. A magic to finding that you could read the same story over and over and over again and it would never get old and would never be the same story twice, not really. The colors were brighter. The emotions were palpable. There was nothing but possibility. And, yes, there's certainly still magic in the stories I read as an adult, but it's never quite the same, is it? I'm a little more jaded in that, as soon as I can predict where the story is going, I lose a little interest. There's a little more cynicism, a little more impatience with an "I've been here before" narrative, and a little more sadness in knowing that I can never immerse myself in adult stories with the same abandon as that 10 year old reading under the catalpa tree.

Now, I bring this up to explain that this is why I love Neil Gaiman. Gaiman can, more so than any other author, create that childlike awe of story within the adult me without telling a children's story. It's a peculiar and wonderful literary alchemy, this ability to take the adult world, the "real" world, and transform it into a place where one can find the same charm, humor, unpredictability, and enchantment found in the best children's narratives. And Anansi Boys is such a book.

A companion book to American Gods, Anansi Boys, follows the story of Fat Charlie, son of Mr. Nancy, a rascal of a man with a wicked sense of humor, an eye for the ladies, and a knack for purposely embarrassing his introverted, sensitive son. When Mr. Nancy dies, the now grown-up, soon to be married, and tenuously employed Fat Charlie is relieved that his father can never humiliate him again; however he soon finds out that life is not going to settle into a mundane, predictable pattern for him. He learns that his father was Anansi, the trickster spider god of African folklore, and he learns that he has a brother, Spider, who inherited his father's mischievous spirit and magical abilities. It's not long before the reunion between the two brothers breaks out into a serious (and frequently hilarious) case of sibling rivalry, with Spider usurping Fat Charlie's apartment, girlfriend, and life, and Fat Charlie going to extreme lengths to rid himself of his demigod brother.

Anansi Boys lacks the darkness of American Gods and is a much more whimsical, comedic read. Initially, this did cause a bit of a disconnect for me until I gave in to the story without trying to connect it with or hold it up to my expectations of American Gods. While following the adventures of Fat Charlie, I found myself laughing aloud and relishing each twist and turn in the story (as well as looking forward to the humorous "in which" chapter titles). Gaiman's love of story is evident and, as we learn through his depiction of Anansi folktales, the stories we tell and the stories we live are important not just for entertainment, but for creating the world as it should be. And the world as it should be is something as close as possible to a catalpa tree as seen through the eyes of a child--a place where anything and everything is possible, because that's where real magic resides.

Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder
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LibraryThing member LisCarey
Charlie Nancy's father ruined his life. And he goes on ruining it even in death—dropping dead on a karaoke stage in Florida, forcing Charlie to go home, leaving his London refuge from his embarrassing parent to attend the funeral—right before his wedding. And even in death, he keeps giving
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Charlie embarrassing gifts, like the handsome stranger who turns up on his doorstep, once he's back in London, claiming to be Charlie's brother, Spider. In short order, Charlie's life is reduced to utter havoc—he's fired from his job, arrested for embezzlement, his fiancée is spending an awful lot of time with Spider, and Charlie has to go back to Florida and take a journey through the spirit world if he's ever going to get control of his life again. Not to mention having to defeat Tiger and prevent all the stories in the world being turned into brutal, hopeless Tiger stories...

With Gaiman, as with Gene Wolfe and John Wright, it's not so much the story as how it's told—you go along for the ride and see where it takes you. Except for the marvelous command of the language, though, he's not really anything like them—his stories are much wilder and crazier, and even harder to predict. Partly this is because he's drawing on different mythologies—African and Native American, where Wolfe and Wright draw more on classical and northern European sources—but, mostly, I think that he's just a wilder and crazier guy.

Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member angry-muppet
This novel by Neil Gaiman was so enjoyable that I recommended it to my son. (He thoroughly enjoyed it as well.) Neil Gaiman weaves a totally believable world in which I was smitten by Fat Charlie.

Old and unfamiliar gods play an important part in the story and as an arachnophobe I even came to like
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the spiders (of all sizes).
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LibraryThing member stephxsu
Thanks, Chase, for getting me to read a lot of Neil Gaiman books, something I've been saying I'd do but never got around to doing until now. I'm not enamored of Gaiman and his stories: stylistically there's little to complain about, and his characters certainly do procure some amusing dialogue. But
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beyond that I find myself having little emotional attachment to any of his books so far. His stories will make for fine discussions, but there is not nearly as much "wiggle room" in terms of personal interpretation of themes as I typically enjoy in books for higher-level discussion classes.
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LibraryThing member dvf1976
I liked American Gods more, and I felt that this book dragged a bit.

BUT, it was worth reading...
LibraryThing member Talbin
Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman, is the story of Fat Charlie Nancy, a man who has just discovered his father has died in a Florida karaoke bar . He is engaged to Rosie, whose mother disapproves of Fat Charlie and who won't have sex with him until they're married. Fat Charlie, who lives in London, heads
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back to the small coastal Florida town he's from and learns that his father is a god and that he has a brother, Spider. He learns from the old women in his hometown how to call up Spider, and from that point on Fat Charlie's life starts to spin out of control. His boss is involved in some shady deals, Spider becomes interested in Rosie (who is interested in Spider), and there's nothing that Fat Charlie can do about any of it.

This is the first book by Gaiman that I've read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Gaiman has based the book on the Anansi stories from West Africa and the Caribbean, and as the book progresses the magical realism of the stories becomes just as "real" as real life. The Anansi of myth is a spider and he weaves all the stories and songs that make up the world. He is a trickster and sometimes interferes with people's lives to do good, sometimes to do mischief, and sometimes just for the heck of it. The trickster figure can be found in many cultures, usually serving much the same purpose. Gaiman does an excellent job of intertwining traditional the traditional trickster myths with today's world. The book is humorous, and Gaiman's style fits the content perfectly. This was a fun book, well-written with a fast-moving plot - I'll be reading more from Gaiman in the future.
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Awards

Locus Award (Finalist — Fantasy Novel — 2006)
Mythopoeic Awards (Finalist — Adult Literature — 2006)
Alex Award (2006)

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2005-09

Physical description

416 p.; 4.19 inches

ISBN

0060515198 / 9780060515195

Local notes

MFT
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