Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty

It's 1979 in Pointe-Noire, second city of the young and flourishing People's Republic of Congo, and ten-year-old Michel is having a hard time dealing with the pressures of growing up. His friend Caroline has made him commit to two children, a white dog and a red car with five seats before deserting him for a more glamorous boy who plays number 11 for one of the local teams, his wealthy Uncle René keeps lecturing him about Marxism, his parents clearly have complicated problems of their own, there is confusing news on the radio about the Shah, Idi Amin, Bokassa, and Giscard d'Estaing, and it's tricky attempting to fly under the radar at school without prejudicing your chance of a good grade in your primary certificate. Fortunately Michel show more has his best friend Lounès and his brother's girlfriend Geneviève rooting for him, not to mention a bit of unofficial support from Georges Brassens, Papa Wemba and the lovely Arthur Rimbaud...

This is the corny old trick of looking at the adult world through the naïve and (accidentally-on-purpose) ironic gaze of a child narrator, something that can soon become irritating if handled clumsily, especially in a book of this length. Mabanckou is obviously aware of the pitfalls of the technique, and dances around them with supreme confidence. The book leaps from mood to mood and topic to topic unpredictably, with characters and storylines coming and going, bits of backstory or inserted narratives hopping in from nowhere when we're least expecting them. We scarcely get a chance to complain that we're fed up with Michel's voice, there's so much else going on around him, and - until it's too late to do anything about it - we don't even get the idea that we are in a carefully constructed narrative that's heading for a pre-planned conclusion. Very clever.

One of the important threads in the book is Michel's attempt to work out where he is in the world, culturally and politically. How does his modern urban experience tie into the stories of traditional village life he hears from his elders? how to resolve the communist rhetoric he hears from his teachers and Uncle René with the culture of buying and selling he lives in? how does all that fit into the francophone culture he's been told he has a stake in as well? and why is everyone being so nasty to the poor Shah when the nasty Idi Amin is living in comfort in Saudi Arabia? None of it makes very much obvious sense, and some of it is there mostly to give Mabanckou scope for faux-naïve jokes about world leaders (like Pompidou and Brezhnev, who have "beaucoup de sourcils" to deal with), but Michel is growing up, and he starts to find some tangible threads to follow in all the mess. Whether or not he makes it to the white dog and the red car with five seats, we have the feeling when we leave him that he is going to find some kind of a purposeful way through the world. show less

"When I'm on the road to happiness, then I'll know that I've finally grown up, that I'm twenty at last", October 31, 2014

This review is from: Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty (Kindle Edition)
Enjoyable first-person narrative, by a young Congolese lad on the verge of starting secondary school. It's the 1970s, and as Michel observes his uncle spouting Marxist ideology, he sees to the hypocrisy of a man determined to hang on to his wealth. The current affairs items that probably went largely unnoticed by European kids - Idi Amin, Bokassa etc - feature significantly in the mind of one living 'just over the border'.
But most of Michel's life is concerned with his own life - father with two wives (though when he goes to stay ewith the 'other family' he show more notes "This is my home too, my sisters and brothers never say that Papa Roger's my foster father, they consider me their real brother.")
First love (and his rival, the local football star); school; and family arguments as his mother yearns for another child and decides to visit a fetisher...I really liked it. show less

Wry humour and some brilliant moments in what is a very grounded story set in a fascinatingly and intentionally run-of-the-mill world. Bright, satirical and well written.

Paperback, x

> Par Sonia Sarfati (LaPresse.ca) : Demain j'aurai vingt ans : doux bonheur de lecture ***1/2

> Par Marine de Tilly (Le Point.fr) : "Demain j'aurai vingt ans" d'Alain Mabanckou