Verre Cassee by Alain Mabanckou
A man sits in a bar, ruminating on his own failures and conversing with an ensemble of memorable characters that pass in and out of the same space. It's archetypal stuff, but Mabanckou transforms it into a work that intimately inhabits its narrator's mind even as it makes a host of bold literary allusions, from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Eug ne Ionesco. A new introduction to this edition by Uzodinma Iweala offers varied and nuanced insights into the novel's themes as well as the initial reception it received when it first appeared in translation. --Words Without Borders In Republic of the Congo, in the town of Trois-Cents, in a bar called Credit Gone West, a former schoolteacher known as Broken Glass drinks red wine and records the stories of the bar and its regulars, including Stubborn Snail, the owner, who must battle church people, ex-alcoholics, tribal leaders, and thugs set on destroying him and his business; the Printer, who had his respectable life in France ruined by a white woman, his wife; Robinette, who could outdrink and outpiss any man until a skinny-legged stranger challenged her reign; and Broken Glass himself, whose own tale involves as much heartbreak, squalor, disappointment, and delusion. A brand-new edition of an irreverent, allusive, scatalogical, tragicomic masterpiece from one of our greatest living Francophone writers.
Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo. An award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, Mabanckou currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. Among his acclaimed novels are African Psycho; Broken Glass; Black Bazaar; and Tomorrow I Will Be Twenty, a fictionalized retelling of Mabanckou's childhood in Congo. In 2015, Mabanckou was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. Helen Stevenson is the author of three novels and has worked as a translator for Faber & Faber and Serpent's Tail. Since taking up full-time writing, she regularly reviews for The Independent. She now lives in London.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9782020849531 |
| ISBN 10 | 2020849534 |
| Title | Verre Cassee |
| Author | Alain Mabanckou |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Editions du Seuil |
| Year published | 2006-06-16 |
| Number of pages | 248 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |