Right from the start, Congolese author Alain Mabanckou has been impossible to pigeonhole, dazzling critics and readers alike with the audacity of his work. The title of his debut, African Psycho, was itself a provocation, a cheeky twist on Brett Easton Ellis’s classic 1991 novel, American Psycho. The book—about an unhinged would-be assassin who worships at the grave of the country’s most notorious serial murderer—gave a sense of Mabanckou’s iconoclastic spirit and fascination with the shadow realms between the living and dead. Careening between high literary references (Borges, Achebe, Dumas, Dostoyevsky, Rabelais) and the frenetic energy of pulp fiction, noir and other popular genres, Mabanckou has charted his own restless, omniverous course in contemporary African fiction. Dubbed “the African Beckett,” he’s wickedly irreverent, even comic, with a streak of phantasmagoric absurdism running through his books. Corrupt and self-important bigwigs are skewered; postcolonial Africa society exposed and dissected.
Mabanckou is also prolific—he’s the author of novels, nonfiction (including a study of James Baldwin, Letter to Jimmy), poetry, translations, and more—and is still seen as something of an enfant terrible in France. He was awarded the prestigious Prix Renaudot in 2006 for his novel Memoirs of a Porcupine, and has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2015 and 2017. In England, his novel Broken Glass was named one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st century by the Guardian.
A professor of literature at UCLA, Mabanckou, 59, has continued to explore the rich, polyglot world of his youth in Pointe-Noire, Congo-Brazzaville, in a variety of fictional guises. This fall, his latest novel, Dealing with the Dead, was published in the U.S. by The New Press, translated by longtime collaborator Helen Stevenson. As Stevenson notes in her afterword, Mabanckou considers himself akin to a migratory bird, one “who remembers the country he’s come from but chooses to stay and sing on the branch where he’s perched.”
Here’s a sampling of five Mabanckou books to help initiate you into the strange and thrilling spell of that voice:
African Psycho, translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley (Soft Skull Press, 2007)
Start at the beginning: African Psycho, the novel that made Mabanckou a literary sensation. Grégoire, a petty criminal adrift in a cynical world, sets out to commit the perfect murder—if only he can muster the steely nerves of his idol, the legendary killer Angoulima, who is buried in the “Dead-Who-Are-Not-Allowed-To-Sleep” cemetery. Mabanckou’s novel is one long rant—against family, society, history. It was also a siren call for a new generation of African writers, breaking free of old clichés of “how to write about Africa” (to echo Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina).
Broken Glass, translated by Helen Stevenson (Soft Skull Press, 2010)
With Broken Glass, Mabanckou’s colorful, entertaining brand of satire is on full display. Like Grégoire, Broken Glass is something of a misanthropic outcaste: He sits at his favorite bar, “Credit Gone West,” and bemoans life’s follies and misadventures while scribbling away furiously in his notebook. Is he a writer? Or just an observer of the sordid hijinks around him? And what does it mean that his mother drowned in the nearby River Tchinouka—isn’t she still hovering around to console him? Again, Mabanckou’s vision is raw, gritty, subversive, earning him comparisons to outsider writers like Céline and Genet.
The Lights of Pointe-Noire, translated by Helen Stevenson (The New Press, 2016)
Mabanckou first left home, the port town of Pointe-Noire on Congo’s southwestern coast, in 1989 at the age of 22. Twenty-five years later he returns, reckoning with his memories as well as the changing face of the country itself. Here is his impressionistic account of the places that appear so vividly in his fiction—the movie theater where he first watched Bollywood films, the grammar school that later became a Pentecostal church. There are absences, too: He is still haunted by the death of his mother in 1995, which he missed—yet another cost of exile.
Black Moses, translated by Helen Stevenson (The New Press, 2017)
Shortlisted for the 2017 International Booker Prize, “Black Moses” revolves around a boy nicknamed “Moses” for short (his full name, Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko means “Let us thank God, the black Moses is born on the lands of the ancestors”), who escapes the terrors of an orphanage only to find himself at the mercy of Pointe-Noire’s nightmarish criminal underworld. His travails are both comic and tragic, evocative of a whole society—1970s and 80s Congo-Brazzaville—on the brink of collapse. Mabanckou’s rollicking humor and poignancy buoy an otherwise grim modern fable.
The Death of Comrade President, translated by Helen Stevenson (The New Press, 2020)
By now, you should be familiar with Pointe-Noire, Mabanckou’s hometown which features in his cycle of novels. “The Death of Comrade President,” a sort of postcolonial political thriller, is set in 1977, after Congo’s president is murdered. Anyone with kinship ties is immediately under suspicion, and for one small boy, Michel, that means his mother, a distant relative, is in mortal danger. Once again, the unraveling of a corrupt and dysfunctional Congo-Brazzaville is viewed from a child’s perspective, with wit, style, and panache. Mabanckou’s exorcism of his country and its past continues at a feverish pitch.
Alain Mabanckou will appear in conversation with Anderson Tepper as part of City of Asylum’s world literature series this Sunday, December 7 at 3pm.
