Broken Glass [Hardcover]

Alain Mabanckou, born in the Republic of the Congo and 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, both the title of the book and its narrator (apparently a Congolese term for scrawny poultry) 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 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 hinting at the pages of Catcher in the Rye.

This is a clever book, very amusing, satirical, mocking and definitely unique. I usually turn 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.

(4.5 stars) 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. His story, much like life itself, is one constantly unreeling narrative in which there are no full-stops--no periods and no capital letters, except for names and places. This stream-of-consciousness approach is so unpretentious, so natural, and so conversational, however, that the reader never has to stop to puzzle about where ideas begin and end or what the author might mean.

The main character, a Congolese alcoholic named Broken Glass, is immortalizing the sad stories of his fellow patrons at a bar called Credit Gone West in the beachfront city of Pointe Noire. A teacher, until he drunkenly bared his buttocks to his class, Broken Glass has traveled the world through books, loving the adventures of Tarzan, Tintin, and Santiago the fisherman, as 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."

Stubborn Snail, the hard-working proprietor of the bar, has convinced the sixty-four-year-old Broken Glass to record the history of Credit Gone West in his stead: " I just don't have that little bug that writers have, that you have, it shows when you talk about literature...you can invent all sorts of other lives and you're just one character in the great book of life." Neither the Stubborn Snail nor Broken Glass believes the old African saying that "when an old person dies, a library burns." As the Snail says, "depends which old person, don't talk cr*p."

Broken Glass's vignettes of the bar's patrons unfold at their own pace. Pampers Man, who was incarcerated without a trial; The Printer, who believes his white wife in Paris is a witch; Mama Mfoa, "the bald soprano, who runs a "bicycle chicken" shop near the bar; and Mouyeki, a sorcerer who claims that he can perform better miracles than Christ, are among the characters whose lives are immortalized. Eventually, the reader learns the sad stories of Broken Glass and the Stubborn Snail, from which they have recovered in varying degrees.

Slangy, funny, and filled with unique observations, Broken Glass's story reveals much about his society, himself, and the role of literature. The customs of the country and its traditions come to life in juxtaposition with Broken Glass's literate references to France's notable literary achievements, references so natural that they become the speaker's "throw-aways." His commentary on dysfunctional politics, the Congo's French colonial heritage, and the regular betrayal of men by women is integrated into the little life stories of his bar-companions to give a broad picture of their world. Broken Glass makes the best of what life offers and does not to expect any more than can be found in the bottom of a bottle. Literate, perceptive, and filled with unique observations, BROKEN GLASS is a one of the rare novels which finds moments of hilarity in stories of otherwise overwhelming sadness. Mary Whipple

This novel has been described in some quarters as comic. This is fair - there are comic scenes and comic characters and satirical disquisitions on contemporary Congolese politics - but the hilarity is in the mode of Céline, whose ruminative, digressive prose style Mabanckou's resembles: corrosive, scabrous, hysterical in both senses, poised continually on the brink of despair.

The narrator Broken Glass (`Verre cassé' in the original) is an alcoholic former schoolmaster who has become an habitué of a 24-hour drinking establishment, Credit Gone West (`Crédit a voyagé'), run by a more successful friend, the Stubborn Snail. The proprietor, proud of his achievement in creating and maintaining this oasis in the teeth of opposition from every conceivable faction, suggests that Broken Glass should write the story of the bar and its clients. Broken Glass, somewhat unwilling, nonetheless embarks on his task and immediately becomes a magnet for the local characters, who are determined to see their own stories recorded in the presumably deathless document.

The book falls into two roughly equal sections: First Part and Last Part. This unconventional titling gives a clue to the arc of the narrative. First Part is more conventionally comic; Last Part is much darker, as Broken Glass's own story and preoccupations begin to take over what might have seemed to that point merely a compendium of amusing anecdotes.

Broken Glass stands revealed as a man soaked in literature, clinging to the fragments of his learning like a drowning man in a sea of alcohol. By dispensing with all punctuation but the comma, Mabanckou has devised a style for his narrator that cunningly resembles the rambling, repetitious, digressive style of the drunk, down to its piercing moments of awful clarity. Through this lens the reader is shown both the life of the poor in Congo-Brazzaville, and the desperate vitality that manages to make something of that life against horrible odds. Mabanckou's protagonist is every man who has had to struggle against his own weaknesses as well as the hostility or indifference of the world.