Broken Glass

Alain Mabanckou's deeply ironic Verre cassé (Broken glass) flows like a river or a song, free of paragraphs or full stops and this may be, partly, why the various voices represented sounded rather same-y to me. The structure is simple: an ex-teacher, nicknamed Broken glass, is writing down the life stories of several down-and-out characters who hang about the same bar in Brazzaville, Congo. They are all men, all beaten down, and all resentful of women in the same way, so it's not surprising perhaps that it comes across as one loser's long, un-self-aware complaint, the more so as every character has the same very recognisable trick of "referencing" the titles of French (mostly) classics and bestsellers.

The mentality shown isn't show more attractive, but Mabanckou doesn't allow simple disapproval, or unreserved sympathy. The defeat and humiliation of these men came by through many factors exacerbating each other, and challenging them more than others, the privileged ones, will ever be challenged. show less

Set in Congo-Brazzaville (homeland of the author), all the non-action takes place in a bar entitled Le Credit a voyage (Credit has gone on a journey), where the bar owner L'Escargot Entete (the stubborn snail) gives a blank notebook to the bar's longest term habitue, Verre Casse (broken glass). He demands that Verre Casse write down the story of the bar, that is, the stories told to him by other patrons of the bar, those, like the man who wears Pampers & the man who once lived in France & worked at the print shop that produced the magazine Paris Match, who are as at the end of the line as the narrator himself. The narrator lives up to his nickname. He is truly a broken glass that can be neither emptied nor filled. He was once an show more elementary school teacher, one who as we might say "went off his rocker" & was finally fired for his bizarre behavior. He's an inveterate drunk. In his sixties, he seems to have spent the past several decades as a permanent fixture of the bar, drinking several bottles of plonk each day, staggering out to piss (& speak affectionately to)an old mango tree in the yard. One of the most bizarre scenes entails a pissing contest between a woman named Robinette & a man named Casimir (not one of the regulars). This is truly a battle of the titans. Robinette loses the contest, as is appropriate in a novel in which a certain misogyny underlies all. This version of misogyny couples with sanctification of the narrator's own mother who jumped into the river & drowned. The author references French & world literature throughout. Reading was the road the narrator chose as a young boy. But this path, at the end of the day, only leads him to Le Credit a voyage bar & perhaps his own last day, his own trip to the river to drown. The novels of Albert Camus came to mind repeatedly while I was reading Verre Casse, especially The Fall, with its fog-enshrouded Amsterdam bar & its judge-penitent. Both novels feature unreliable narrators. In fact, all who tell their stories, both the narrator & those who confess / protest to him are unreliable. Camus's The First Man is also evoked; Camus's own impoverished childhood in the streets & schools of Algiers & his own intense love for his silent, illiterate mother. I suspect that allusions to the social & political history of Congo-Brazzaville are also embedded in the novel. As I am completely uninformed about the country (other than knowing that it was once a French colony)I am unable to discern what these might mean. show less

A tragicomic novel narrated by a wine-drinking bar patron named Broken Glass who hangs out at a place called Credit Gone West, whose proprietor, Stubborn Snail gives Broken Glass a notebook in which to record stories about the people around them. I'm tempted to keep that sentence going because that's how Mabanckou writes the book: there are no periods, and some paragraphs go for pages. Somehow, it worked for me, probably because of Broken Glass's elements of carnival and the grotesque. I particularly enjoyed the tension between the immediacy of all the bodily functions and smells, and the desire to commit those stories to history and memory.

(I received a copy of the book from the publisher.)

I wrote more about Broken Glass on my blog, show more target="_top">here. show less

Alain Mabanckou (1966-) is a Francophone Congolese author who was educated in Brazzaville and Paris, moved to the US to teach at the University of Michigan in 2002, and currently is a professor in the Department of French and Francophone studies at UCLA. He has written six volumes of poetry and six novels; to date only African Psycho and Broken Glass have been translated into English. He has won several literary prizes, including the Prix Renaudot in 2006 for Memoires de porc-épic (Memoirs of a Porcupine) and the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire for his first novel Bleu-Blanc-Rouge (Blue-White-Red). Last month Broken Glass received the French-Israeli Literary Prize at the Jerusalem International Book Fair.

Broken Glass is the show more nickname of an elderly regular at the 'Credit Gone West', a dive in a seedy Congolese town. He spends his days getting drunk on palm wine and eating bicycle chicken, after his drinking habits cause him to lose his teaching position, his wife of many years, and ultimately his home. The owner of the bar, the Stubborn Snail, recognizes his love of literature and gives him a notebook to record the history of the bar and its customers. The regulars eagerly tell Broken Glass of their conquests and downfalls, and he records them in narrative form. Broken Glass is an unreliable narrator, and the men embellish their stories for posterity, each claiming that his story is the most tragic and vital.

The characters are colorful but vulgar and pathetic, but Broken Glass tells their stories with great humor and wit, with numerous references to literature and popular culture. He also includes his own story, including his plan to reunite with his late mother.

This was a most enjoyable read, and I'll be looking forward to the release of his other books in English. show less

novelist Alain Mabanckou is a wonderful writer who captures the voice of his narrator, Broken Glass, and the people whose stories he tells, and whose language flows, and this is true even though he has an unusual way of writing, using only commas as punctuation, so there are in effect no sentences, just paragraphs, and even those "sentences" as paragraphs have no capital letter at the beginning and no period at the end, yet there is never any trouble following along with what Mabanckou is saying, although it may take a little getting used to, and it surely must have been difficult to write that way, as I am finding as I write this paragraph, and equally if not more difficult for the translator to convey the feeling of this writing style show more in English, so now, because this is not an easy way for me to write, even though I often write long run-on sentences myself, I'm going to stop and write the rest of this review in a more comfortable, for me, style

This is the second book by Mabanckou that I've read, although he wrote it first, and I didn't warm to it quite as much as I did to Memoirs of a Porcupine, although it did grow on me as I was reading it. It is narrated by Broken Glass, a 60-something alcoholic former teacher who now spends nights and days at Credit Gone West, a bar run by his friend, the Stubborn Snail, who has visions of fame and grandeur for what is in essence a dive. Stubborn Snail, because he worries about Broken Glass and because he is seeking publicity, gives Broken Glass a notebook to record the story of the bar. At first, Broken Glass tells the stories that some of the habitués of Credit Gone West feel compelled to tell him, and these stories are generally crude, and often scatological, but nevertheless humorous and understanding of the frailties of humanity and the harshness of life. In the second part, Broken Glass moves into his own story, writing more or less backwards in time, and the reader learns how he wound up losing his job and his wife and ending up more or less broken down hanging out in a seedy bar, despite his love of language and his familiarity with the great works of literature of the world.

For one of the fascinating things about this novel is the way Broken Glass weaves the titles of novels into his narration, as well as references to what happened in some of those novels. To give a feel for this, here is an example:

"they swore he'd be eating boiled potatoes, become a beggar, one of God's bits of wood, sleeping in a barrel, like a certain ancient philosopher, and still the Stubborn Snail stood firm, determined as a chess player, and the years went by in dubious battle, till his envious components got bored of nitpicking, he resisted the confederacy of dunces, and the other barkeepers all called him names . . ." p.19

One of the things I liked about this novel is that it seems that Broken Glass himself got more insight into his life as he wrote about his history -- the same experience the reader is having -- and begins to see that some people, such as the woman who sells him his bicycle chicken, actually care about him (not that this changes the decision he makes towards the end of the book). This is a much more clever and complicated book that it seems at the beginning show less

This book is written as the book the main character is writing as he sits in a bar in the Congo. With that in mind there are two things to remember. Firstly you may not like the writing style- huge paragraphs full of single sentences broken up with commas. This is jarring at first but you will get used to it and find the strange rhythm at the heart of this book. Was that pretentious enough for you? Secondly there are some surprisngly graphic and some might say vulgar episodes described here which may shock. That said this is a rare slice of life from a country we rarely get to glimpse in the Western world and for that it should be applauded.

My expectations were high, after reading a NYT BkRev. I recall "new voice" and an indication of depth. Unfortunately, the philistine interpretation of depth is just another word for violent, and new voice is nothing but a bitter voice--which is certainly not new.
What this book has going for it is a clear an authentic voice, albeit not original nor new. Likewise the actions and motives of the characters ring true as well. Yet, not enough of the geo-political dynamics are brought into play to make this book about the Cameroon or Nigeria. It is a story about people. In that fishbowl, did the people evolve?
This is a book about a peter-pan man who enchantment is worn too thin to support their lives any longer as the monkey on their back show more is more persistent. Rather than rid themselves of the monkey the moniker of the blame they put on the women in their lives, who they mistakenly think they are loving, when they wield their penises. This is how the men began and ended. Since the book is not about the women, the fact they abandoned these men is not critical to the story. show less