Broken Glass
Author(s): Alain Mabanckou
The history of 'Credit Gone Away', a squalid Congolese bar, is related by one of its most loyal customers, Broken Glass, who has been commissioned by its owner to set down an account of the characters who frequent it. Broken Glass himself is a disgraced alcoholic school teacher with a love of French language and literature which he has largely failed to communicate to his pupils but which he displays in the pages of his notebook. The notebook is also a farewell to the bar and to his fellow drinkers. After writing the final words Broken Glass will go down to the River Tchinouka and throw himself into its murky waters, where his lamented mother also drowned. First published in France 2005;' this translation 2009.
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Shortlisted for Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010.
"'This is Taxi Driver for Africa's blank generation... a deftly ironic Grand Guignol, a pulp fiction vision of Frantz Fanon's "wretched of the earth" that somehow manages to be both frightening and self-mocking at the same time' Time Out, New York. '[An] auspicious debut from a francophone author who most certainly deserves to be discovered. It is smart, stylish and plenty "literary"' Globe and Mall. 'Mabanckou's novel... discovers a fascinating new way to hang readers on those tenterhooks... African Psycho presents no gloomy Raskolnikov, nor the fixed sneer of Patrick Bateman, but a haunted burlesque' The Believer 'A macabre but comical take on a would-be serial killer' Vanity Fair. 'Disturbing - and disturbingly funny' New Yorker. 'Broken Glass proves to be an obsessive, slyly playful raconteur... the prose runs wild to weave endless sentences, their rhythm and pace attuned to the narrator's rhetorical extravagances... With his sourly comic recollections, Broken Glass makes a fine companion' Independent.
Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in the Congo. He currently lives in California, where he teaches French literature at UCLA. One of Africa's major writers, he is the author of six volumes of poetry and six novels. He received the prestigious Prix Renaudot for Memoirs of a Porcupine. He was selected by the French journal Lire as one of the fifty writers to watch out for this coming century.
General Fields
- :
- : 556780
- : 556780
- : 19 February 2009
- : 220mm X mm
- : United Kingdom
- : books
Special Fields
- : Alain Mabanckou
- : Paperback
- : 409
- : 843.914