Category Archives: Books in translation

Celestial Objects: Jokha Alharthi

16 Saturday May 2020

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Translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth

Celestial Objects is a novel by Omani writer Jokha Alharthi that won the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. This makes it unusual—there aren’t a lot of books by Omani writers translated into English, and this is the first novel written originally in Arabic to win the prize.

The novel tells the story of a family the village of al-Awafi, and through their lives, shows the shifts in attitudes and changes taking place in Oman over three generations.  Azzan and Salima have three daughters: Mayya, constantly bent over her sewing machine, bookish Asma and beautiful Khawla. When the book starts, Mayya has just been told she is getting married to Abdullah, a businessman. She is in love with her cousin and doesn’t want to marry Abdullah, but doesn’t feel she has a choice.

Abdullah falls in love with Mayya when he sees her absorbed in her sewing. Like her, he is bound by family—he has a violent father who decides the direction Abdallah’s life will take. Abdullah takes care of his father, but he is also afraid of him, a fear that is so deeply ingrained that it becomes a part of who he is. It is not only the women who are oppressed. Abdullah is caught between wanting to break free and needing to do his duty by his father.

The other two sisters have a bit more of a say in their marriages. Asma agrees to marry Khalid, who has been chosen for her, after giving it some thought. She makes the decision with her head, thinking that Khalid will support her in finishing her studies, which he does.  Khawla refuses Khalid’s brother, saying she is promised to her cousin, a childhood sweetheart. She waits for him to return from Canada, and he turns out to be a wastrel but she marries him anyway.

It was customary for families to own slaves, some of whom worked in the house as domestic help, like Zarifa, owned by Abdullah’s father. She is also his mistress and a surrogate mother to Abdullah. After Abdullah’s mother disappears when he is very young, Zarifa raises him, and she is the one person he is close to.

When slavery is abolished in 1970, Zarifa’s son strikes out for himself, much to his mother’s dismay. He tries to explain to her that no one can own them anymore, that they are free to do as they please, but she will not leave her old master.

This is a fascinating glimpse into the lives of Omanis, and the changes that happened over the years. Mayya names her daughter London in spite of opposition from everyone, including Abdallah. It was as if she focused her yearning for other places, for a wider world on her daughter; it was a promise to her child that she will have the opportunities that Mayya never had. And by the time London grows up, things have changed, and she does have more freedom than her mother had.

The book moves back and forth between first-person and third-person narrative. The only character who tells his own story is Abdullah. You see the marriage from his point of view and follow his search for the truth about what really happened to his mother. All the other chapters focus on a particular character in turn. Time is also flexible, moving between the past, present and future, all sometimes with the same chapter. It’s not a device often used and has the effect of a multi-faceted piece, where you get to see the whole picture at once.

The Memory Police: Yoko Ogawa

04 Saturday Apr 2020

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Translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder

“‘Things go on disappearing, one by one. … It doesn’t hurt, and you won’t even be particularly sad. One morning you’ll simply wake up and it will be over, before you’ve even realized. … People gather in little groups out in the street to talk about their memories of the thing that’s been lost. … But no one makes much of a fuss, and it’s over in a few days. Soon enough, things are back to normal, as though nothing has happened, and no one can even recall what it was that disappeared.’”

On an unnamed Japanese island, things are disappearing: emeralds, ribbons, bells, stamps, birds, photographs. Soon the people forget they even existed, except for a few who are unable to forget and try to salvage the disappeared things. The mother of the unnamed narrator, a novelist, is one such person. She pays for it—one day, the Memory Police come to take her away, and the narrator never sees her again.

Because none of the disappearances are natural occurrences. They are being orchestrated by a nebulous power—a dictatorship of some kind, although that is never clear. The Memory Police are the enforcers of this power, scouring the island for those who can’t forget.

The book the novelist is working on is an echo of the situation on the island. It is about a young typist and her teacher. Under his influence, she gradually loses her voice and can only communicate by typing. But when her typewriter breaks down, the teacher lures her to a room in the tower under the pretext of repairing it. He imprisons her in that room filled with broken typewriters.

The one person the novelist trusts completely with her work is her editor, R. But he is, like her mother, someone who is unable to forget. Worried that he will meet the same fate as her mother, she decides to hide him in her home, with the help of an old man who was married to her nurse. But it isn’t easy hiding a man under the eyes of the Memory Police. And how long can she hang on when everything around her is vanishing into thin air?

The way the book is written is almost like a fable. Most of the characters do not have names, as if they were insubstantial. It is about the loss of memory, a loss so deep that looking at a disappeared object brings no spark of recognition. It is also about a loss of identity, of the loss of control over our innermost selves. Our memories make us who are and if they start to dissipate and vanish, then who are we? This haunting book stayed with me for a while after I had finished reading it.

Beyond the Rice Fields: Naivo

21 Saturday Mar 2020

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Translated from French by Allison M. Charrette

This is the first novel from Madagascar to be translated into English. It tells the story of Rafa, a young woman, and Tsito, the boy her father buys her for a slave. Their relationship is closer than mistress and slave—they are around the same age and they grow up together as playmates and friends.

Through Fara and Tsito, the novel charts Madagascar’s history in the 19th century: the influence of Christianity through schools set up by missionaries, the persecution of Christians, and the struggle of the local leaders to maintain their independence.

Fara lives with her mother Bao and her grandmother Bebe. Fado, her father, has another family and only visits Bao occasionally. Tsito is in love with Fara, who is fond of him but does not return his love. Instead she is infatuated with Faly, a bully who Tsito hates—Faly has been picking on Tsito ever since he arrived at the village.

The two children are sent to the local missionary school with Vero, one of their playmates. Vero eventually joins a group of evangelists, which puts her in danger when the new Empress wants to rid the country of Christianity, which she feels is destroying the old ways.

In the meantime, Tsito has been taken under the wing of Ibambo, a powerful slave. Thanks to him, Tsito gets a job with Andriamady, a local lord. His new job takes him to the big city—the City of Thousands. He comes across his old enemy, Faly, who has become an important and ruthless man.

Political shifts, like everywhere else, have consequences on the countryside. Rado is a victim—once a rice farmer, who was also a zebu herder, he is now doing odd jobs, thanks to a group of the kingdom’s dignitaries. Tsito realizes that “The changes happening at the heart of the kingdom hadn’t just cost him his commercial connections; they’d also cost him his rice fields.”

This rich narrative moves between the points of view of Tsito and Fara. Apart from describing a period of Madagascar’s history, it is also a love story, a tale about the battle between the traditional and the “white man’s ways”—neither of which come off well—and the struggle of ordinary people, trying to live their lives as best they can in the face of injustice and manipulation by competing powers. I got completely absorbed in the lives of the characters. It was a great introduction to the history of Madagascar.

Babylon: Yasmina Reza

29 Saturday Feb 2020

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Translated from French by Linda Asher

“The world isn’t tidy. It’s a mess. I don’t try to make it neat.”

This epigraph from Garry Winograd, an American street photographer, opens the book. The story is narrated by Elisabeth, a sixty-year-old woman looking back at a particular day in her life.

When we first meet her, she is looking at a photograph of a Jehovah’s Witness from 1955 by Robert Frank in his book The Americans, which she keeps by her bedside, “the saddest book on earth. Dead people, gas pumps, people alone in cowboy hats. Turning the pages you see a parade of jukeboxes, television sets, trappings of the new prosperity. They’re just about as lonely as the man, these oversized new objects, too heavy, too bright, set down in spots unprepared for them.”

These images of disconnection, loneliness and the impossibility to finding order in life, run throughout the book. “People who think there’s some orderly system to life — they’re lucky”, Elisabeth thinks. The events of that particular day in her life bear witness to the randomness of life, to what happens when someone acts on an impulse that most people would have resisted.

Elisabeth and her husband Pierre live in a small apartment in Paris. She befriends their neighbours, Jean-Lino and Lydie. Lydie is a singer and a New Age healer, very flamboyant, unlike Jean-Lino, whom Elisabeth thinks of later as a “Robert Frank character for our times” (again that feeling of loneliness, of a lack of connection). Elisabeth decides to throw a party to which she invites the couple.

All her energies are focused around the party: will there be enough place for people to sit, are there enough wine glasses (no, there are not, and she buys more than she could possibly use). The party goes well until Jean-Lino makes fun of Lydie’s insistence on knowing whether the chicken she was eating at a restaurant had the freedom to roost while it lived. He runs around the room, flapping like a chicken. Lydie takes offence, and the couple leave.

The couple continue their argument in their apartment, things spiral out of control and soon Jean-Lino is ringing Elisabeth’s and Pierre’s doorbell to tell them he has strangled Lydie. The couple go up, try to persuade him to call the police but eventually give up and go home. But Elisabeth can’t imagine leaving Jean-Lino alone with the body. Once Pierre is asleep, she goes upstairs. Things become surreal and almost darkly comic, as Elisabeth tries to help Jean-Lino move the body.

Throughout the narration, Elisabeth seems to be a little detached, as if she was on the outside, watching herself. And once the events of the night are over and their consequences done with, life seems to go on.

I liked the tone of the novel—Yasmina Reza does not dramatize the already-dramatic events, but narrates them in a matter-of-fact way. And throughout the book there is the sense of life happening almost in spite of ourselves.  

Beauty is a Wound: Eka Kurniawan

01 Saturday Feb 2020

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Translated from Indonesian by Annie Tucker

“One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. … She had passed away at fifty-two, rose again after being dead for twenty-one years, and from that point forward nobody knew exactly how to calculate her age.”

This novel tells the story of Dewi Ayu, a mixed-race prostitute living in Halimunda, a coastal town in Indonesia. Through her story and that of her family, Eka Kurniawan traces the history of the country, from the Dutch colonial period to post-independence. He weaves together history, legends, magic realism and humour to tell a compelling tale.

Dewi Ayu comes from a privileged family, born out of an incestuous relationship. She is left with her Dutch grandparents, who raise her. When the Japanese invade Indonesia during the Second World War, her grandparents leave for the Netherlands, but Dewi Ayu decides to stay. She, with other young girls, is taken from an internment camp to become comfort women for the Japanese soldiers. She quickly emerges as someone who is unflappable and is capable of taking care of herself.

When she goes back to Halimandu, she gains a reputation as the most beautiful and accomplished prostitute. Over the years, she gives birth to four daughters: three stunningly beautiful—Alamanda, Adinda and Maya Dewi—and Beauty, who is spectacularly ugly. Dewi Ayu dies soon after Beauty is born; it is to see her youngest daughter that Dewi Ayu rises from the grave.

The fortunes of the family are intertwined with the story of Indonesia: the men the three older girls marry all play a role in the country’s independence. Alamanda falls in love with Comrade Kliwon, a Communist, but makes a mistake when she toys with the older regional military commander, Shodancho, and has to marry him. Her sister Adinda eventually marries Kliwon. And Maya Dewi is married to Maman Gedong, a thug who used to be a revolutionary.

The book is rich and full of twists—and what a cast of characters! Kurniawan gives them all breathing room so you get to know them (even though you won’t like all of them). But Dewi Ayu dominates them all. She is so alive, she practically leaps off the page. There are some stomach-churning moments (bestiality, incest) but also times where I found myself chuckling.

I thoroughly enjoyed Beauty is a Wound—it is original, absorbing, funny and moving.

On a personal note: I bought this English translation of an Indonesian novel in a little bookshop in Venice, proving that literature does travel!

A Man Called Ove: Fredrick Backman

25 Saturday Jan 2020

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Translated from Swedish by Henning Koch

“Ove is fifty-nine. He drives a Saab. He’s the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars and his finger a policeman’s flashlight.”

When we meet him, Ove is trying to buy an iPad and driving the salesman crazy. (He often has that effect on people.) He is a stickler for rules, especially the ones he makes, and finds most people a waste of time.  

But his world is about to change. A new family moves in next door: Parvaneh, an Iranian woman, her husband Patrick and their two young daughters. In spite of himself, the family—especially Parvaneh—become an important part of Ove’s life. As does the mangy cat who haunts his doorstep, and Jimmy, his next-door neighbour (when Jimmy was a child, Ove got rid of the boy’s abusive father). There is also Mirsad, a young gay man who Ove takes in when his father throws him out.

The grumpy man we meet at the beginning of the book is fleshed out little by little, both through his interactions with his neighbours, and through his memories, especially of his adored wife Sonja. She brings light into his life and understands him in a way no one else does. When she dies, Ove can’t see the point of continuing to live.

He sets his affairs in order and tries to kill himself. He is stymied every time, often by his neighbours, who just won’t leave him alone, much to his annoyance: “Considering how they are constantly preventing him from dying, these neighbours of his are certainly not shy when it comes to driving a man to the brink of madness and suicide. That’s for sure”, he grumbles.

I loved the way Fredrick Backman writes about deeply moving events without losing sight of the humour (see the quote above). It is a beautiful portrait of a marriage, a relationship between two people who care deeply for each other but are completely different. Backman brings it alive through little details: “She had a way of folding her index finger into his palm, hiding it inside. And he always felt that nothing in the world was impossible when she did that.” Ove’s pain over the loss of his wife is heart-breaking.

I also loved the relationship between him and Parvaneh. She is a wonderful character—strong, feisty and full of compassion. From being what he sees as an annoying neighbour, she becomes his closest friend and the person he trusts to take care of his affairs after his death.

This book had me laughing and crying and most of all, believing in these people. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Go, Went, Gone: Jenny Erpenbeck

04 Saturday Jan 2020

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Translated from German by Susan Bernofsky

“War destroys everything…your family, your friends, the place where you lived, your work, your life. When you become foreign…you don’t have a choice. You don’t know where to go. You don’t know anything. I can’t see myself anymore, can’t see the child I used to be.”

The voices here are of African migrants, men who have risked everything to escape danger and to try to make a better life for themselves in Germany. We see them through the eyes of Richard, a retired classics professor living in Berlin. Richard grew up in East Germany and is still dealing with the reunification of the country. His sense of displacement is, to a much greater degree, echoed by that of the migrants.

It all starts when Richard walks past a group of African migrants demonstrating on Aleksanderplatz. He decides to learn more about these men and under the guise of doing research, he gets to know them. Most of them have made the dangerous crossing over the Mediterranean from Libya and have seen people die. Many of them barely speak German, but Richard’s knowledge of English and Italian helps him.

Little by little, we learn their stories. There is Rashid from northern Nigeria, whose boat capsized—he couldn’t swim and survived by hanging on to a cable, and watched his fellow passengers die. There is Awad from Ghana, who lived with his father in Tripoli, Libya. But father was shot during the civil war, and Awad was captured by the soldiers and beaten. “If you’re lucky, you get beaten, if you’re unlucky, you get shot”, says someone to comfort him. Then the soldiers put the prisoners on a boat and said anyone who tried to get off the boat would be shot. Richard asks him whether they were Gaddafi’s men or rebels. “We didn’t know. They all had the same uniform. … In any case, no one was on our side. Even though I grew up in Libya. Libya was my country.”

Sometimes the migrants find it hard to explain their lives to someone who comes from such a different world, such as the young Tuareg from Niger: “Why should he tell a stranger that he doesn’t know why he never had any parents? … Why should he tell him that he doesn’t know if his parents are still alive? There was fighting going on at the time when he was born. Maybe his mother or his father was among the people buried alive beneath the sand by the Nigerian soldiers, or hacked to pieces or burned alive.”

The migrants, however, are not welcome in Germany. The Kafkaesque system discourages them from staying, as Richard finds out when he tries to help them find work. Like so many other refugees and migrants throughout the world, they want to contribute to society but are prevented from doing so by the system.

It took me a little while to get into the book. In the early part of the book, I felt that the migrants’ stories were like so many we have heard—I didn’t feel that the characters were real. But it was well worth staying with because Jenny Erpenbeck does round them out and by the end, they are utterly convincing. And one other gripe: Erpenbeck refers to the festival as Eid Mubarak, which is like talking about Merry Christmas instead of Christmas. Eid Mubarak is the Eid greeting. It is jarring and could have easily been avoided.

This book puts human faces to one of the biggest crises of the 21st century. It is also a character study of a man whose little life is transformed by the migrants. Just knowing them forces him out of his isolation and makes him a part of a community. Which just reinforces the fact that the “other” is not someone to be feared but someone who could just enrich your world.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: Olga Tokarczuk

16 Saturday Nov 2019

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Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

“[S]ometimes I feel we’re living in a world we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves… And then we spend our whole lives struggling with that we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”

The middle of winter in Poland, near the Czech border. Janina Duszejko is one of three people who live in the little hamlet during the winter, when the summer visitors have gone.  She is woken one night by her neighbour Oddball (she has names for everyone—she finds their given names inadequate), who tells her that their neighbour Big Foot is dead. They find Big Foot lying on the floor of his house, having choked on the bone of a deer he had killed and cooked. Duszejko feels it is rough justice. 

Big Foot’s death is followed by the murder of the chief of police, who used to hunt. He is found in a well with deer footprints all around him. And then the body of the rich entrepreneur who runs a fox farm is found in the woods, weeks after his disappearance. Duszejko is convinced that it is the animals taking their revenge, but she is dismissed as a batty old woman.

But this is not a simple whodunit and Duszejko is no batty old woman. She is the narrator, observant, funny, honest and a little melancholic, haunted by the disappearance of her two dogs. She looks out for the animals who live in the forest around her and has far more sympathy for them than for most humans.  

One of her frequent visitors (almost the only visitor) is Dizzy, who used to be her student and is now working with the police. On his visits, he not only keeps her abreast of the investigation but works with her on his real passion: the poetry of William Blake that he is translating. Lines from the poetry of William Blake are scattered throughout the book, resonating with Duszejko’s connection with nature and her anger at the way it is being desecrated.

Interwoven with the murder mystery are questions of animal rights and astrology. As Duszejko tries to unravel the mystery around her, she muses on vegetarianism, human arrogance and the importance of astrological forces—she is a keen astrologer. Convinced that the alignment of stars at a person’s birth can predict their death, she starts studying the charts of the victims.

This is an unusual book, a riff on the relationship between humans and animals, and how skewed it is. The hunters have erected wooden towers, reminiscent of a concentration camp. These are called pulpits. Listening to a priest praise hunting at a mass, celebrating it as honouring nature, Duszejko understands why: “In a pulpit, Man places himself above other Creatures and grants himself the right to their life and death. He becomes a tyrant and a usurper.”

There is a lot of passion here, and Duszejko is an engaging character: sharp, unafraid to tell it like it is, angry and empathetic at the same time. I loved this book—it has been beautifully translated, and the use of initial capitals on some nouns reminded me of some of the classics of the 18th century. But this is very much a novel of its time. I would strongly recommend it.

Olga Tokarczuk won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Frankenstein in Baghdad: Ahmed Sadaawi

28 Saturday Sep 2019

Posted by in Books in translation, Fantasy / Sci-Fi / Ghosts, Fiction, The reading challenge

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Translated from Arabic by Jonathan Wright

Ahmed Sadaawi takes the story of Frankenstein and transposes it to Baghdad in the early 2000s, in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq. Bombs go off regularly on the streets and people die every day. But not all of them get a decent burial—bits of bodies lie rotting on the streets, unclaimed. Wanting to force the authorities to recognize that the body parts are as deserving of a proper burial as whole corpses, Hadi, a rather disreputable junk dealer, starts collecting and stitching them together to make a whole man. He dubs the corpse Whatsitsname.

But things get out of hand. There is a huge explosion on Tayaran Square—a bomber tries to attack the Sadeer Novotel Hotel but is thwarted by Hasib, a young security guard. The hotel is spared the explosion but Hasib is blown up in the process.

Hasib’s soul, released from his body, drifts towards the river, wanting to touch it. He sees a man in a white vest and shorts drifting with the current. “Go and find what happened to your body”, the man says. “Don’t stay here.” A teenager sitting on his grave gives him the same advice. “You have to find it or some other body, or else things will end badly for you.”

But Hasib’s body isn’t whole anymore. He goes looking for another one, finds Whatitsname and moves in.

Hadi wakes up in the morning to find the corpse missing. Hasib/Whatitsname has gone to the house next door, which belongs to Elishva, a widow. She never got over the fact that her son Daniel never returned from the war, although everyone around her is convinced that he is dead. So when Hasib, in his new body, walks into her house, she is convinced that Daniel has come back.

Initially, Hasib/Whatitsname wreaks vengeance on those who are responsible for killing the people whose body parts he is using. But as the parts decompose, he has to keep replacing them, and some of the dead are not exactly innocent themselves. As rumours about him grow, he gathers a following who move in with him. Meanwhile the head of the Tracking and Pursuit Unit has decided to capture this strange creature haunting the streets of Baghdad.

This is a clever book, full of black humour. You do need a strong stomach at times, but it is well worth it. The story is told partly from the perspective of Whatitsname, who records his account for a journalist. The characters are vivid, especially Elishva, whose closest confidants are her cat and a picture of St. George on her wall.

Sadaawi paints a picture of a city caught up in violence and uncertainty but where people still try to get on with their lives. And where everyone has a right to their story, even if it is a creature that is an amalgamation of various humans. It is funny, poignant and in spite of drawing the central idea from Mary Shelley, is utterly original. It is not surprising that it won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

The Lights of Pointe-Noire: Alain Mabanckou

25 Sunday Aug 2019

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Translated from French by Helen Stevenson

Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989, when he was 22, and didn’t go back for 23 years, not even when his mother died. Refusing to accept her death, he keeps up the myth that she is alive and well. “The truth was I dreaded coming face to face with the body of the woman I had last seen smiling, full of life.” But you can only evade the truth for so long. Returning to his hometown, Pointe-Noire, is a way of accepting her death.

His mother’s presence permeates the book. Pauline Kengué was a strong woman who felt it a dishonour to show her vulnerability to her son. He remembers, “I had to peer down deep into those eyes to catch sight of her worries; she had a way of keeping them from me, through a sudden contraction of her pupils.” Abandoned by Mabanckou’s father a few months before his birth, she left her village and moved to the town, determined to raise her child and “scale the endless steps that rose before her”. When Mabanckou was leaving for Paris, Mama Pauline travelled over 500 kilometres to Brazzaville to see him off. They spent a few hours in the café together. As she got up to go, she said to him, “Just don’t disappoint me”. He never saw her again.

A refusal to accept the death of loved ones runs through the book. Mabanckou brings his two dead older sisters “back to life” when he was in primary school to stop his classmates teasing him for being an only child. He says that they are tall, beautiful, speak almost all the known languages and drive in a red Citroën DS. The myth becomes so real that he hears his sisters come into the kitchen at night, looking for food. But he needn’t have worried. Every night, Mama Pauline has been leaving two plates of food for them outside the kitchen door.

The book is full of vivid memories of the people and the places that were part of Mabanckou’s life. The man Mabanckou calls his father is Papa Roger, Mama Pauline’s husband. He writes of him with affection: Papa Roger was responsible for getting Mabanckou interested in reading and probably laid the foundations for his career as a writer.

Then there was Grandma Hélène who took care of people, mostly by feeding them vast quantities of food. All they had to do was drift past her house at mealtimes. Mabanckou and his friend would see adults emerging from her house “fit to burst, like boa constrictors who’ve swallowed an antelope”. She cooked for an army and would remember everyone who hadn’t come to eat her food.

Twenty-three years is a long time, and the town has changed. The Victory Hotel where Papa Roger worked is still standing but the Cinema Rex, where Mabanckou used to watch Bruce Lee films, has become a Pentecostal church. The magic of the movies has been replaced by pastors threatening wrongdoers with hellfire. His old school has been renamed Lycée Victor-Augagneur, after a French colonialist, a man who was probably unknown in his own country.

Coming home is never easy when you have been away a long time. You are tugged by the old stories, legends and the things that have shaped you. But you are also a part of something outside your home—the adult who has made his/her place in the world. The Lights of Pointe-Noire reflects this dichotomy as it moves between childhood memories and the present. It is also a book of memories, grief and acceptance.

And Mama Pauline is always at the centre, like the miracle woman who lives in the moon. When the woman scatters shooting stars from her basket, children are born. And when someone dies, she turns off the stars. She was powerful but in no circumstance was she ever to be mentioned. “We kids would point her out just with a tilt of the nose, a lift of the chin, convinced we mustn’t point at her or utter the slightest sound, or we’d wake the next morning and find we’d been struck deaf or blind.” According to legend, she sacrificed herself to take on the sins of the world.

Looking up at the moon after his mother’s death, Mabanckou wonders if the old woman has retired and been replaced by a younger woman, “the woman I know best and who would have accepted the sacrifice too, the woman who brought me into this world”.