The No1 Ethical retailer for Books, CD’s, DVD’s & Games
30 Day Refund Guarantee

Broken Glass

Broken Glass

by HelenStevenson (Translator), Alain Mabanckou (Author)

  • Used

    Paperback 2010

    $114.45
Synopsis

The history of Credit Gone West, a squalid Congolese bar, is related by one of its most loyal customers, Broken Glass, who has been commissioned by its owner to set down an account of the characters who frequent it. Broken Glass himself is a disgraced alcoholic school teacher with a love of French language and literature which he has largely failed to communicate to his pupils but which he displays in the pages of his notebook. The notebook is also a farewell to the bar and to his fellow drinkers. After writing the final words, Broken Glass will go down to the River Tchinouka and throw himself into its murky waters, where his lamented mother also drowned.

$114.45

Quantity

1 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 288
 Publisher: Serpent's Tail
Published: 25 Feb 2010
ISBN 10: 184668675X
ISBN 13: 9781846686757
Book Overview: A Congolese riff on European classics from the most notable Francophone African writer of his generation

Media Reviews
Broken Glass is a comic romp that releases Mabanckou's sense of humour... Although its cultural and intertextual musings could fuel innumerable doctorates, the real meat of Broken Glass is its comic brio, and Mabanckou's jokes work the whole spectrum of humour -- Tibor Fischer * Guardian *
Broken Glass proves to be an obsessive, slyly playful raconteur... the prose runs wild to weave endless sentences, their rhythm and pace attuned to the narrator's rhetorical extravagances... With his sourly comic recollections, Broken Glass makes a fine companion -- Peter Carty * Independent *
Deserves the acclaim heaped upon it... self-mocking and ironic, a thought-provoking glimpse into a stricken country * Waterstone's Books Quarterly *
A dizzying combination of erudition, bawdy humour and linguistic effervescence -- Melissa McClements * Financial Times *
This bar-room yarn-spinner tells his fellow tipplers' tales in a voice that swings between broad farce and aching tragedy. His farewell performance from a perch in Credit Gone West abounds in scorching wit and flights of eloquence... vitriolic comedy and pugnacious irreverence. -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent *
Author Bio
Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in the Congo. He currently lives in California, where he teaches French literature at UCLA. One of Africa's major writers, he is the author of six volumes of poetry and six novels. He received the prestigious Prix Renaudot for Memoirs of a Porcupine. He was selected by the French journal Lire as one of the fifty writers to watch out for this coming century.