Born in the Republic of the Congo, Alain Mabanckou is now a Professor in the French Department of the University of California. He has written six novels and if Broken Glass is anything to go by, his reputation as a writer to watch in the 21st century is well-deserved.
Broken Glass (apparently a Congolese term for scrawny poultry), both the title of the book and its narrator is set in the Credit Gone West bar. Broken Glass spends far too much time in the bar and is intimately acquainted with many of its regular customers. The owner of the bar, The Stubborn Snail, gives Broken Glass a notebook and tells him to write the tragi-comic life stories of some of the customers, such as The Printer and The Pampers Man.
We soon discover that Broken Glass has a unique writing style well-suited to describing the embarrassingly painful (but hilarious) experiences of these disreputable characters. Each one seems to have brought on themselves various types of disasters and Broken Glass does not spare their feelings in recounting their excruciatingly awful experiences.
The humour is black, but is also sprinkled with many references to French literature, for Broken Glass was a teacher before he took to drink, and his knowledge of Chateaubriand and Marivaux infects his writing throughout the book. Mabanckou teases his readers with a wide range of quotations and references from many sources which are slipped into the text almost without us noticing. Even Holden Caulfield makes an appearance and Broken Glass has a rather oblique conversation with him which references Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.
This is a clever book, very amusing, satirical, mocking and definitely unique. I sometimes find myself ing away from African books, the bleakness being almost too much to bear, but in Alain Mabanckou we have a writer who is above all funny, and while this book will entertain for a few hours, the man Broken Glass will remain in the memory as one of literatures unique personalities.
