Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou

Abstract

Julián Fuks Resistance Trans. Daniel Hahn. Edinburgh. Charco Press. 2018. 154 pages. In Resistance, Julián Fuks explores how the horror of life under an oppressive government —in this case, the military dictatorship in 1970s Argentina—inscribes itself into a family’s life, affecting even those members who weren’t yet born during those trying times. Sebastián, the narrator of Resistance, uses his older brother’s adoption as a lens through which to examine his family history, their present-day estrangements , the act of writing, and the nature of political resistance. Sebastián’s parents, both dissidents, fled Argentina for the relative safety of Brazil when his older brother was an infant. Now Sebastián obsesses over his brother’s origins and his parents’ role as political actors, mining incidents from his childhood to try to understand his brother and why they’ve grown distant from each other as adults. The subtext to this is the book that Sebasti án is struggling to write about his family and how that guides his explorations. Of his writing, Fuks has said, “Soy un autor que no sabe inventar” (I’m an author who doesn’t know how to make things up), and the number of biographical details shared by author and narrator tip Resistance into the category of autofiction. Fuks toys with this idea in the last few pages of the novel, when his frustrated narrator shares his manuscript with his parents, who critique his view of events, offering their own interpretations and memories in place of his. Fuks’s novel arrives in English at an opportune moment. In describing how his parents remember their life in Argentina, he finds that they’ve never fully shaken off their fear of being found out, and he asks them why they are afraid now. “Dictatorships can come back,” Sebastián’s father warns him, a maxim that the author himself recently reflected on in the Guardian when discussing the election of Jair Bolsonaro: “The journey Jair Bolsonaro is planning has as its destination a past that we have never overcome, dark decades that have never left us.” Resistance is an examination of one such past as well as a possible roadmap for the future. Andrea Shah Boca Raton, Florida Alain Mabanckou Broken Glass Trans. Helen Stevenson. New York. Soft Skull Press. 2018. 176 pages. Last year, Black Moses stood as a testament to Alain Mabanckou’s literary prowess , positing a journey of growth amid the grotesque while ensuring a classic (see WLT, Nov. 2017, 70–71). Mabanckou’s tendency to compose intricate figures against the backdrop of the Republic of the Congo, however, echoed over a decade prior within Broken Glass. Bizarre, harrowing, and humorous even in its darkest moments, Broken Glass entails many of the stylistic experiments and musings that would eventually position Mabanckou as a master of his craft. Unlike the novelist’s most recent outing , Broken Glass is less of a journey than it is a hazy collection of vignettes transcribed through the sometimes incoherent lens of the titular drunkard. Once an instructor, Broken Glass spends much of his conscious time in Credit Gone West, a bar playing host to several characters, each dragging a fractured history not unlike Broken Glass himself. Much of the work involves the abrasive recountings of the denizens’ past as they desperately struggle to harness their own tragedies. Though some resolve to change and others to stagnate , most accept their time at Credit Gone West as an indefinite stint of purgatory. Though this narrative is not quite as engaging as that of Black Moses, it does offer far more of what Mabanckou builds his power upon: intense, personal illustrations. The prose itself, like much of Mabanckou ’s work, opts against the most typical stylistic conventions, and translator Helen Stevenson maintains the writer’s portrait of consciousness verbatim. Recounts and actions often mesh like the depths of a most Books in Review 78 WLT WINTER 2019 severe relapse, yet moments of epiphany emerge as if hurled from the crevices of Broken Glass’s mind. Mabanckou is surgical with his use of incoherence—faint allusions will reward the most patient of readers as the text unravels...