SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese author who now teaches French literature at UCLA, writes an often hilarious, non-stop narrative full of life and excitement, a narrative which, at the same time, is also mordant in its depictions of life. The main character, a Congolese alcoholic named Broken Glass, is memorializing the sad stories of his fellow patrons of a bar called Credit Gone West in the beachfront city of Pointe Noire in the Republic of Congo. A teacher, until he was accused of pedophilia for drunkenly baring his buttocks to his class, Broken Glass has traveled the world through books, loving the adventures of Tarzan, Tintin, and Santiago the fisherman, while he was a child, and then going on to study and enjoy the French classics. Ultimately he tells the “civilized” literary world that “Until the day your characters start to see how the rest of us earn our nightly crust, there’ll be no such thing as literature.”

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It is 1897, and a motley group of British functionaries is running a concessionary station, only marginally successful, in Ukassa Falls in the Congo Free State, trading and exploring, mapping new areas of the country for further exploration, and using natives to strip minerals from quarries. Individually, however, their primary mission is protecting themselves and their jobs, while keeping an eye on a more lucrative Belgian enterprise across the river and on the slave-trader Hammad, who fancies himself the potential emperor of a future, native-run country. When gunfire signals the arrival of an unexpected visitor, Capt. James Frasier hopes it means the return to British jurisdiction of his friend, Nicholas Frere, who, missing for 51 days in the wilderness, is now in Belgian custody, awaiting trial for killing a native child.

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