The novel has always been controversial, inspiring both admiration and contempt among Western and Nigerian critics, but has emerged as one of the most important texts in the African literary canon, translated into more than a dozen languages.

The narrator meets an old man who is actually a god seven months after departing from his hometown who promises to provide answers if he brings Death from his house with a magical net.

The narrator saves the lady and takes her as his wife but the town head does not tell him where the dead tapster is knowing that he would immediately depart if he knew.

The narrator journeys back home and uses the egg to provide infinite food and palm wine to his town and surrounding areas during a famine.

However, the people accidentally smash the egg as they play around it in jubilation and quickly turn on the narrator, scorning him as they realize no more food can be produced.

[10] The New Yorker took this criticism to its logical ends, stating that Tutuola was "being taken a great deal too seriously" as he is just a "natural storyteller" with a "lack of inhibition" and an "uncorrupted innocence" whose text was not new to anyone who had been raised on "old-fashioned nursery literature".

In The Spectator, Kingsley Amis called the book an "unfathomable African myth" but credited it with a "unique grotesque humour" that is a "severe test" for the reader.

[12] Given these Western reviews, it is not surprising that African intellectuals of the time saw the book as bad for Africa, believing that the story showed Nigerians as illiterate and superstitious drunks.

[17] Rather than seeing the book as mere pastiche, critics began to note that Tutuola had done a great deal "to impose an extraordinary unity upon his apparently random collection of traditional material" and that what may have started as "fragments of folklore, ritual and belief" had "all passed through the transmuting fire of an individual imagination".

[18] The Nigerian critic E. N. Obiechina argued that the narrator's "cosmopolitanism" enables him "to move freely through the rigidly partitioned world of the traditional folk-tale".

[20] The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe also defended Tutuola's work, stating that it could be read as a moral commentary on Western consumerism.