Dealing with the Dead
Alain Mabanckou
Belletristik/Erzählende Literatur
Beschreibung
'One of Africa's greatest living writers' Guardian
'Sharp and entertaining' Times Literary Supplement
'Exuberant ... Dealing with the Dead is often damning, frequently hilarious and always compassionate' Financial Times
Abruptly deceased at the age of twenty-four and trapped forever in flared purple trousers, Liwa Ekimakingaï encounters the other residents of Frère Lachaise cemetery, all of whom have their own complex stories of life and death.
Unwilling to relinquish their tender bond, Liwa makes his way back home to Pointe-Noire to see his devoted grandmother one last time, against all spectral advice. But disturbing rumours swirl together with Liwa's jumbled memories of his last night on earth, leading him to pursue the riddle of his own untimely demise. A phantasmagorical tale of ambition, community and forces beyond human control, Dealing with the Dead is a scathing satire on corruption and political violence by one of the foremost chroniclers of modern Central Africa.
'Africa's Samuel Beckett' Economist
Translated from the French by Helen Stevenson
Rezensionen
Mabanckou interweaves horror and gallows humour to great effect, the shifts in tone are beautifully controlled, and his prose is rendered into exquisite English by Stevenson
Exuberant ... <i>Dealing with the Dead</i> is often damning, frequently hilarious and always compassionate. At just 200 pages, Helen Stevenson's translation from the French performs supple shifts between registers and keeps the story moving at lightning pace. It'
A sharp and entertaining addition to Alain Mabanckou's broader portrayal of Pointe-Noire'
Alain Mabanckou addresses the reader with exuberant inventiveness in novels that are brilliantly imaginative in their forms of storytelling. His voice is vividly colloquial, mischievous and often outrageous as he explores, from multiple angles, the country where he grew up, drawing on its political conflicts and compromises, disappointments and hopes. He acts the jester, but with serious intent and lacerating effect.
We should all be reading Alain Mabanckou right now. His brilliantly imaginative novels throw a rope across borders and between people. A glorious, funny, surreal novel, set in communist Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s.
Mabanckou presents us with a sexy, pulsating city while mining deadpan comedy from its superstitions and its corrupt clerical and political elite
Mabanckou'
This is writing that literally and figuratively reshapes you, revealing spatial and emotional dimensions that are both all too foreign and all too familiar. Mabanckou infuses his novel with the macabre to move, unnerve, and unexpectedly delight
Mabanckou sketches the eccentric cast of local characters, living and dead, with satirical wit and loving detail
Funny, spooky and surreal, this shapeshifting novel is at once serious and comic, spooky and cheerful, grave and bitter, erudite, gossipy, moralising and excoriating
Kundenbewertungen
magical realism, international booker, shehan karunatilaka, Reservoir 13, The Dead, seven moons of maali almeida, traditional african belief, booker prize, Sony Lab’ou Tansi, Emmanuel Dongala, Lincoln in the Bardo, Pedro Paramo, James Joyce