Broken Glass

Broken Glass, a broken-down Congolese former schoolteacher, spends his life in a Brazzaville bar named Credit Gone West, lamenting his lost marriage, his lost job and his lost life, drowning himself in cheap red wine. Then the bar's eccentric, inscrutable owner gives him a notebook, and Broken Glass' whole world begins to spill breathlessly onto the page.

In language that struts and brawls like a sailor on shore leave, this none-more-unreliable narrator unleashes sentences of fiendish length and complexity, looping from subject to subject, disappointment to disappointment, with a manic erudition borne of a lifetime's indiscriminate reading of French and world literature. The world Broken Glass unfurls for us is a place of desperate sadness and wickedly black humour: there are ghosts floating above the river, spectacular urinating contests, prostitutes and sexual dysfunction; there are defecatory accidents, sadness, loss, and endless booze.

Told in intoxicating prose, and poised between riot and despair like an unholy cross-fertilisation of Beckett, Bukowski and Rabelais, Alain Mabanckou's darkly glittering novel is an astringent portrait of post-colonial ennui and contemporary African social collapse, as well as a brilliantly witty homage to the written word.