Dealing with the Dead

"For years, fairly or unfairly, Alain Mabanckou has shouldered the mantle of “the African Samuel Beckett” for his philosophical bent, linguistic mischief and keen sense of the absurd. In his new novel, the Congolese author, now based in California, returns to the coastal city where he grew up, Pointe-Noire, Republic of Congo. This also happens to be the place where you died – “you,” in this case, referring to the book’s second-person point of view, a newly minted member of the deceased whose life, death and peculiar experiences after death shape this prismatic portrait of a city. Like the traditional, semiprofessional mourners who show up at your funeral – known in Helen Stevenson’s translation from the original French as “singer-dancer-weepers” – the novel nimbly dances from mood to mood in a loopy narrative arc that’s as restlessly surprising as it is convincing."