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3.6 AVERAGE
3.6 AVERAGE
Not the easiest of books to read, as there don't seem to be any full stops/periods! Some parts are amusing, and there are plenty of literary references, though I know I missed most of them!
challenging
funny
slow-paced
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Broken Glass is a novel from the Congo (aka the Republic of the Congo aka Congo-Brazzaville; i.e. the smaller of the two Congos, not the one which used to be Zaire). It was translated from French by Helen Stevenson.
It takes the form of the notebook jottings of the customer at a bar called Credit Gone West. Perhaps rather than try to explain:
let’s say the boss of the bar Credit Gone West gave me this notebook to fill, he’s convinced that I – Broken Glass – can turn out a book, because one day, for a laugh, I told him about this famous writer who drank like a fish, and had to be picked up off the the street when he got drunk, which shows you should never joke with the boss, he takes everything literally, when he gave me this notebook he said from the start it was only for him, no one else would read it, and when I asked why he was so set on this notebook, he said he didn’t want Credit Gone West just to vanish one day, and added that people in this country have no sense of the importance of memory, that the days when grandmothers reminisced from their deathbeds was gone now, this is the age of the written word, that’s all that’s left, the spoken word’s just black smoke, wild cat’s piss, the boss of Credit Gone West doesn’t like ready-made phrases like ‘in Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns‘, every time he hears that worn-out cliché he gets mad, he’ll say ‘depends which old person, don’t talk crap, I only trust what’s written down‘, so I thought I’d jot a few things down here from time to time, just to make him happy, though I’m not sure what I’m saying, I admit I’ve begun to quite enjoy it, I won’t tell him that, though, he’ll get ideas and start to push me to do more and more, and I want to be free to write when I want, when I can, there’s nothing worse than forced labour, I’m not his ghost, I’m writing this for myself as well, that’s why I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes when he reads these pages, I don’t intend to spare him or anyone else, by the time he reads this, though, I’ll no longer be one of his customers, I’ll be dragging my bag of bones about some other place, just slip him the document quietly before I go saying ‘mission accomplished’
That’s the whole of the first chapter; the entire book is written without full stops in this way as long, run-on sentences. Generally it’s a pretty effective device, though at times it can be a bit tiring to read.
The first few chapters tell the stories of other customers at the bar, and then the second half of the book concentrates on Broken Glass’s own life, and how he went from being a school teacher to a drunkard. As the material becomes more personal the tone shifts from comic to melancholy, and the book ended up being more moving than I would have expected after the first couple of chapters.
It takes the form of the notebook jottings of the customer at a bar called Credit Gone West. Perhaps rather than try to explain:
let’s say the boss of the bar Credit Gone West gave me this notebook to fill, he’s convinced that I – Broken Glass – can turn out a book, because one day, for a laugh, I told him about this famous writer who drank like a fish, and had to be picked up off the the street when he got drunk, which shows you should never joke with the boss, he takes everything literally, when he gave me this notebook he said from the start it was only for him, no one else would read it, and when I asked why he was so set on this notebook, he said he didn’t want Credit Gone West just to vanish one day, and added that people in this country have no sense of the importance of memory, that the days when grandmothers reminisced from their deathbeds was gone now, this is the age of the written word, that’s all that’s left, the spoken word’s just black smoke, wild cat’s piss, the boss of Credit Gone West doesn’t like ready-made phrases like ‘in Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns‘, every time he hears that worn-out cliché he gets mad, he’ll say ‘depends which old person, don’t talk crap, I only trust what’s written down‘, so I thought I’d jot a few things down here from time to time, just to make him happy, though I’m not sure what I’m saying, I admit I’ve begun to quite enjoy it, I won’t tell him that, though, he’ll get ideas and start to push me to do more and more, and I want to be free to write when I want, when I can, there’s nothing worse than forced labour, I’m not his ghost, I’m writing this for myself as well, that’s why I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes when he reads these pages, I don’t intend to spare him or anyone else, by the time he reads this, though, I’ll no longer be one of his customers, I’ll be dragging my bag of bones about some other place, just slip him the document quietly before I go saying ‘mission accomplished’
That’s the whole of the first chapter; the entire book is written without full stops in this way as long, run-on sentences. Generally it’s a pretty effective device, though at times it can be a bit tiring to read.
The first few chapters tell the stories of other customers at the bar, and then the second half of the book concentrates on Broken Glass’s own life, and how he went from being a school teacher to a drunkard. As the material becomes more personal the tone shifts from comic to melancholy, and the book ended up being more moving than I would have expected after the first couple of chapters.
"When I asked why he was so set on this notebook, he said he didn’t want Credit Gone West just to vanish one day, and added that people in this country have no sense of the importance of memory, that the days when grandmothers reminisced from their deathbeds was gone now, this is the age of the written word, that’s all that’s left, the spoken word’s just black smoke, wild cat’s piss, the boss of Credit Gone West doesn’t like ready-made phrases like ‘in Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns,’ every time he hears that worn-out cliché he gets mad, he’ll say ‘depends which old person, don’t talk crap, I only trust what’s written down’ "
Broken Glass, a former schoolteacher, is now a drunk and one of the most loyal customers of the Credit Gone West bar, whose owner, The Stubborn Snail, asks him to write a notebook of his own story and that of the other unfortunates that pass through the bar.
The story that unfolds is written in unbroken prose, as the Stubborn Snail observes when he reads the notebook, sighing:
"'it's a real mess this book, there are no full stops, only commas and more commas, sometimes speech marks when someone's talking, that's not right, I think you should tidy it up a bit, don't you, how am I supposed to read all that, if it's all run together like that, you need to leave some spaces, a few breathing places, some pauses'"
In fact the novel is highly readable, perhaps because Broken Glass (or Mabanckou, or even his editor) has taken mercy on the reader and broken the capital letter and full stop-less text into paragraphs and chapters.
Broken Glass boasts that, as a schoolteacher, he encouraged his pupils to treat the French language as something to be broken:
"I swear, too, that I loved teaching them their past participles conjugated with avoir, and whether you have to make them agree or not depending on the time of day and the weather, and the poor little things, dazed, confused, sometimes even angry, would ask me why the past participle does agree today at four o’clock, but didn’t yesterday at midday, just before lunch break, and I would tell them that what mattered in the French language was not the rules, but the exceptions to the rules, I would tell them that if they could understand, and memorize all the exceptions in this language, which was as changeable as the weather, then the rules would automatically become apparent, they would be obvious from first principles, and when they were grown up they could forget all about the rules and the sentence structure, because by then they would see that the French language isn’t a long quiet river, but rather a river to be diverted"
Mabanckou has made similar claims for his writing, but to be this didn't come across in Helen Stephenson's otherwise excellent translation, simply because English is in any case a more flexible and less refined language than French i.e. the contrast to usual novels is less marked.
Broken Glass's story is crude, sexual and scatological, Rabelaisian is perhaps the best term not least because despite the crudity of the story Broken Glass is widely versed in world literature: "I'll travelled, one might say, through literature, each time I've opened a book the pages echoed with a noise like the dip of a paddle in midstream, and throughout the odyssey I never crossed a single border, and so never had to produce a passport, I'd just pick a destination at random, setting my prejudices firmly to one side, and be welcomed with open arms in places swarming with weird and wonderful characters"
And the text is littered with passing literary references sometimes direct, most often buried in the text: someone accused of abusing his children responds "Do you see me nipping buds, shooting at a child" after the Kenzaburo Oe novel, Vargas Llosa's "Feast of the Goat" is a national festival, Broken Glass laments how he is approaching "my final autumn as a patriach (Garcia Marquez), and even a bizarre cameo appearance from Holden Caulfield, still asking anyone who will listen what happens to the ducks in that leave in the winter. The publisher notes on the back that the book contains the title of 170 classics of international literature - I didn't spot anywhere near that many, and indeed it would be nice to see a list so one can play a literary game of i-spy (as I did with Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez titles once I noticed them appearing).
Overall, an odd book to judge. At face value a rather simple and crude bar-room tale, but there is a lot of literary merit going on underneath, not all obvious to the reader, particularly in translation.
Broken Glass, a former schoolteacher, is now a drunk and one of the most loyal customers of the Credit Gone West bar, whose owner, The Stubborn Snail, asks him to write a notebook of his own story and that of the other unfortunates that pass through the bar.
The story that unfolds is written in unbroken prose, as the Stubborn Snail observes when he reads the notebook, sighing:
"'it's a real mess this book, there are no full stops, only commas and more commas, sometimes speech marks when someone's talking, that's not right, I think you should tidy it up a bit, don't you, how am I supposed to read all that, if it's all run together like that, you need to leave some spaces, a few breathing places, some pauses'"
In fact the novel is highly readable, perhaps because Broken Glass (or Mabanckou, or even his editor) has taken mercy on the reader and broken the capital letter and full stop-less text into paragraphs and chapters.
Broken Glass boasts that, as a schoolteacher, he encouraged his pupils to treat the French language as something to be broken:
"I swear, too, that I loved teaching them their past participles conjugated with avoir, and whether you have to make them agree or not depending on the time of day and the weather, and the poor little things, dazed, confused, sometimes even angry, would ask me why the past participle does agree today at four o’clock, but didn’t yesterday at midday, just before lunch break, and I would tell them that what mattered in the French language was not the rules, but the exceptions to the rules, I would tell them that if they could understand, and memorize all the exceptions in this language, which was as changeable as the weather, then the rules would automatically become apparent, they would be obvious from first principles, and when they were grown up they could forget all about the rules and the sentence structure, because by then they would see that the French language isn’t a long quiet river, but rather a river to be diverted"
Mabanckou has made similar claims for his writing, but to be this didn't come across in Helen Stephenson's otherwise excellent translation, simply because English is in any case a more flexible and less refined language than French i.e. the contrast to usual novels is less marked.
Broken Glass's story is crude, sexual and scatological, Rabelaisian is perhaps the best term not least because despite the crudity of the story Broken Glass is widely versed in world literature: "I'll travelled, one might say, through literature, each time I've opened a book the pages echoed with a noise like the dip of a paddle in midstream, and throughout the odyssey I never crossed a single border, and so never had to produce a passport, I'd just pick a destination at random, setting my prejudices firmly to one side, and be welcomed with open arms in places swarming with weird and wonderful characters"
And the text is littered with passing literary references sometimes direct, most often buried in the text: someone accused of abusing his children responds "Do you see me nipping buds, shooting at a child" after the Kenzaburo Oe novel, Vargas Llosa's "Feast of the Goat" is a national festival, Broken Glass laments how he is approaching "my final autumn as a patriach (Garcia Marquez), and even a bizarre cameo appearance from Holden Caulfield, still asking anyone who will listen what happens to the ducks in that leave in the winter. The publisher notes on the back that the book contains the title of 170 classics of international literature - I didn't spot anywhere near that many, and indeed it would be nice to see a list so one can play a literary game of i-spy (as I did with Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez titles once I noticed them appearing).
Overall, an odd book to judge. At face value a rather simple and crude bar-room tale, but there is a lot of literary merit going on underneath, not all obvious to the reader, particularly in translation.
Much thanks to Soft Skull for reissuing this wonderful book! Composed of one long run-on sentence (no periods or capitalization, but there are section breaks), Broken Glass is a collection of journalistic ramblings of the title character--a disgraced, drunk former school teacher and regular at the Congolese bar Credit Gone West. Mabanckou expertly packs his short novel with sly literary allusions and ridiculous scatalogical humor, as we cycle through the absurd tales of the bar's patrons. Despite its hilarity, the book is a serious and sad take on both addiction and colonialism: will definitely be reading more from this guy. (Pub Date: Oct 9, 2018)