Study Guide T/A Lifespan Development

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A Forest of Flowers is a collection of nineteen short stories divided into two sections - ironically entitled Home, Sweet Home and High Life. The stories, darkly comic and enriched by tuneful dialogue, explore the absurdity of life for characters whose ambitions, modest as they are, are constantly thwarted by disgruntled spirits - in the form of idle and corrupt officials, adulterous spouses, envious relatives and grasping, untrustworthy entrepreneurs. Through a series of episodes, seemingly parochial and small scale, a nation is shown cracking up under the pressures of maladministration, corporate greed, sloth, ignorance and mercenary self-interest, while its people struggle against government neglect and abuse, racketeering, poverty, disease, superstition and ethnic mistrust. The widest cracks appear between disregarded rural communities and the urban centres, the latter homes to city slickers whose slickness is greased by misappropriated revenue from the oil fields that ooze a widening slick of moral and cultural corruption.