Broken Glass

Part of the enjoyment in reading Alain Mabanckou's novel Broken Glass comes in finding the dozens of literary references that seed the text. Titles like The Feast of the Goat and The Autumn of the Patriarch pop up as part of the narrative; expressions like "strait gate" suggest other books (Gide in this case); and the narrator himself, Broken Glass, is a kind of Hemingway-Faulkner, drinking and writing with equal fervor. There are no periods in the text; it is separated only by commas and type breaks. Other writers who have managed this trick successfully (Thomas Bernhard, Friedrich Durrenmatt) have a new member of their club. The tale, set in Congo-Brazzaville, includes all kinds of damaged and striving characters in all kinds of desperate situations. A pungent, not a pretty, book.