Reviewed by: Du sang et des larmes par Mohamed Condé Deborah Gaensbauer CondÉ, Mohamed. Du sang et des larmes. L'Harmattan, 2022. ISBN 978-2-14-027691-0. Pp. 162. This highly political story of a young boy, Sima, who survives acute childhood leukemia to become a contested leader of a Guinean opposition party, reflects the complexity of the author's syncretic Muslim and Malinke background and his broad involvement as an educator, journalist, and government official in Guinea's turbulent politics. Condé's revised edition of his first published novel augments the meticulous cultural, political, and topographical details that contextualize a very broad spectrum of events and relationships, further enhancing its distinct pedagogical value. The first of the novel's three sections, focalized principally through the perceptions of the seven-year-old Sima's father, Madu, depicts with moving attunement to parental anguish the crucial role of tradition and community in Guinean society. Vacillating between revolt and resignation and ambivalent recourse to spiritualism and herbal remedies as well as mainstream medical practices, Madu struggles for roughly a year to obtain a visa permitting Sima's hospitalization in Paris. Emphasis on the obstacles to Madu's quest posed by bureaucracy in Conakry and distrustful French immigration policies serves to introduce the numerous analyses and critiques of clandestine migration that figure as a primary binding theme in the novel. Intensifying critiques of post-independence Guinea in the second and third sections increasingly inflect the story with a didactic political emphasis. Recovered from leukemia in the second section, thanks to extraordinary familial devotion and combined interventions of traditional African healers and French oncologists, Sima becomes immersed in a community of Guinean expatriates in Paris. Condé relays their dissident conversations at length, mobilizing what is a recurrent and sometimes artistically artificial device to incorporate analyses and background material that would otherwise fall outside the immediate development of the narrative. In the most significant change made to the 2022 edition, Condé eliminates this kind of dramatic tension-breaking elaboration to powerful effect at the end of the novel. Sima, having somewhat naively risked accepting the post of Guinean prime minister, is assassinated just as he believes he is about to succeed in imposing democratic reforms. "La soif du pouvoir de l'homme est plus cruelle que le cancer" (159). This reaction from a witness concludes both editions but with significantly different contextualization. In the first edition, a moralizing commentary on Guinean politics prefaces the remark, clearly distinguishing corrupt government officials from the visionary Sima. In the revised version, the comment is not elaborated. Couched in a fraught ambiguity, it becomes interpretable as a warning generalizable to all political ambitions. The novel's multiple exhortations to young Guineans to resist migration and draw strength from what Condé represents as a uniquely African sense of community are thus complicated by a stark acknowledgement of risks inherent in [End Page 228] fighting for life-sustaining conditions in present-day Guinea. (Between the two versions, Condé was abruptly dismissed from his position as Secretary General of the Ministry of Information and Communication.) Written from a perspective as critical of contemporary Guinea as it is of Western cultural and economic hegemony, Du sang et des larmes is a politically courageous and disturbing portrayal of the fragility of democracy. [End Page 229] Deborah Gaensbauer Regis University (CO), emerita Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French