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| Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty by Alain Mabanckou – review | Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty by Alain Mabanckou – review |
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| Alain Mabanckou, a novelist of exuberant originality, started a literary festival in Congo-Brazzaville this year. It opened in a stately house overlooking the Congo river, built for Charles de Gaulle's exile from Nazi-occupied Paris, when equatorial Africa was the heart of free France. As Michel, the 10-year-old narrator of Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty, grasps this history: "General de Gaulle came to Brazzaville to announce that France was no longer in France, that the capital of France was no longer Paris, with the Eiffel Tower – Brazzaville was now the capital of free France. So the French all became Congolese like us." | Alain Mabanckou, a novelist of exuberant originality, started a literary festival in Congo-Brazzaville this year. It opened in a stately house overlooking the Congo river, built for Charles de Gaulle's exile from Nazi-occupied Paris, when equatorial Africa was the heart of free France. As Michel, the 10-year-old narrator of Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty, grasps this history: "General de Gaulle came to Brazzaville to announce that France was no longer in France, that the capital of France was no longer Paris, with the Eiffel Tower – Brazzaville was now the capital of free France. So the French all became Congolese like us." |
| Such refreshing logic pervades this delightful comic novel in which the boy narrator's ingenuousness is teamed with a sly authorial wit. Mabanckou writes what resembles memoir while taking the liberties of fiction: in many respects, this is his own 1970s childhood in what was then the People's Republic of Congo. Bigger, ex-Belgian Congo across the river was still Mobutu's Zaire (though as Michel thinks, "the smaller a country, the bigger its problems"). | Such refreshing logic pervades this delightful comic novel in which the boy narrator's ingenuousness is teamed with a sly authorial wit. Mabanckou writes what resembles memoir while taking the liberties of fiction: in many respects, this is his own 1970s childhood in what was then the People's Republic of Congo. Bigger, ex-Belgian Congo across the river was still Mobutu's Zaire (though as Michel thinks, "the smaller a country, the bigger its problems"). |
| Michel imbibes the ruling party's communist mantras at primary school, along with its icons. An immortal, he objects, is "someone like Spiderman, Blek le Roc, Tintin or Superman, who never dies. I don't understand why we have to say that comrade president Marien Ngouabi is immortal when everyone knows he's dead." He also knows their ruler thinks elections "slow down the Revolution". | Michel imbibes the ruling party's communist mantras at primary school, along with its icons. An immortal, he objects, is "someone like Spiderman, Blek le Roc, Tintin or Superman, who never dies. I don't understand why we have to say that comrade president Marien Ngouabi is immortal when everyone knows he's dead." He also knows their ruler thinks elections "slow down the Revolution". |
| Mabanckou's portrait of the artist shows the boy grappling with the schisms and hypocrisy of the adult world. He struggles to tell communists from capitalists. His Uncle René, who bins Victor Hugo for writing that "Africa has no history", keeps a photo of Lenin. René says he's a communist, but changes cars every six months and steals his sisters' inheritance with a nod to ancestral male prerogative. As the boy sees it, "Perhaps if you're rich in this life, you always want to be richer, and you stop noticing that the people around you have nothing." | Mabanckou's portrait of the artist shows the boy grappling with the schisms and hypocrisy of the adult world. He struggles to tell communists from capitalists. His Uncle René, who bins Victor Hugo for writing that "Africa has no history", keeps a photo of Lenin. René says he's a communist, but changes cars every six months and steals his sisters' inheritance with a nod to ancestral male prerogative. As the boy sees it, "Perhaps if you're rich in this life, you always want to be richer, and you stop noticing that the people around you have nothing." |
| Mabanckou's mother died in 1995; he recreates her in Maman Pauline, an irascible life force who scolds Michel for his targets of fun ("if a woman's big it means she has a big heart"). Papa Roger, a receptionist in a French-owned hotel, collects books discarded by the European guests, furnishing Michel with his first library. Roger, Michel's step-father, divides his time between two families. But Michel views Maman Martine as "my mother too", and his seven step-siblings are close. His conversations with his eldest brother's girlfriend provide an adult counterpart to his own budding love and jealousy. | Mabanckou's mother died in 1995; he recreates her in Maman Pauline, an irascible life force who scolds Michel for his targets of fun ("if a woman's big it means she has a big heart"). Papa Roger, a receptionist in a French-owned hotel, collects books discarded by the European guests, furnishing Michel with his first library. Roger, Michel's step-father, divides his time between two families. But Michel views Maman Martine as "my mother too", and his seven step-siblings are close. His conversations with his eldest brother's girlfriend provide an adult counterpart to his own budding love and jealousy. |
| This sparkling portrayal of an urban, postcolonial childhood encompasses Chinese doctors, Indian movies, Senegalese shopkeepers and the French who "go on looking after our oil for us". Yet this open world jostles with one the novel gently mocks. When a fetishist decides that Michel holds the key to his mother's womb, and her failure to have a second child, the innocent boy joins forces with a vagabond-philosopher to search the bins for the lost key. | This sparkling portrayal of an urban, postcolonial childhood encompasses Chinese doctors, Indian movies, Senegalese shopkeepers and the French who "go on looking after our oil for us". Yet this open world jostles with one the novel gently mocks. When a fetishist decides that Michel holds the key to his mother's womb, and her failure to have a second child, the innocent boy joins forces with a vagabond-philosopher to search the bins for the lost key. |
| The Nobel laureate JMG Le Clézio, in an afterword to this translation, brackets Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty with The Catcher in the Rye. Its seductive charm and intelligence recentre the world, so that all readers can indeed become Congolese. | The Nobel laureate JMG Le Clézio, in an afterword to this translation, brackets Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty with The Catcher in the Rye. Its seductive charm and intelligence recentre the world, so that all readers can indeed become Congolese. |
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