The Street Book

Biyi Bandele's third novel, The Street, is a surreal and picaresque trawl through the weird and wonderful streets of Brixton. At the heart of the book are several, loosely interlinked stories featuring larger-than-life characters: the painter Nehusta and her father Ossie Jones, following his awakening from a fifteen-year coma; Dada, a Nigerian journalist, and his cousin, the Heckler, who spends most of his time berating the various sandwich-board preachers gathering outside Brixton tube; and Haifa Kampana, who is so obsessed by the till girl at his local 7-eleven he secretly stalks and photographs her for months on end. According to the unnamed narrator, all of these odd, and very funny characters, are "people reaching out to one another, searching for love". They are also the main focus of Bandele's constantly exhilarating portrayal of Brixton people and places. The Street, like Bandele's earlier The Sympathetic Undertaker and other Dreams, is a witty, quasi- documentary, exercise in the urban surrealism of everyday life, the main effect of which is an endlessly proliferating field of vision ranging from black comedy to metaphysical speculation, sentimental melodrama to the language of dreams and romance. --David MarriottRead More