Alain Mabanckou, the acclaimed Francophone-Congolese writer, repeatedly returns in his books to his childhood home, Pointe-Noire in Congo-Brazzaville, where he was born in 1966. His latest novel is no exception.
Dealing With the Dead begins as a ghost story and ends with an excoriating account of kleptocracy. Mabanckou, who studied law in Paris and currently teaches literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, clearly enjoys experimenting with styles and blends magic realism, crime, mythology and satire into the mix, while echoes of Marcel Proust and Nathaniel Hawthorne add to the tale’s rich texture.
Like his titular protagonist in Black Moses (translated by Helen Stevenson and longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker international prize) Mabanckou’s picaresque hero, Liwa, is an orphan. The novel is divided into three parts. In the first, entitled The Longest Dream of Your Death, Liwa wakes in Frère-Lachaise, the “cemetery of the poor”, to discover he had died three days earlier, aged 24. Through a series of vignettes, we are transported with Liwa back to Trois-Cents, the poor neighbourhood where he grew up. In the middle segment, Liwa is visited by his new, ghostly community, eager to share their own experiences and deaths – these surreal encounters are treated matter-of-factly by Mabanckou. In the final part, Liwa returns to the fateful night he lost his life in order to confront his murderer and the novel turns into something darker.
Dealing With the Dead is peopled by an array of memorable characters, from Prosper Milandou, a former director of human resources who becomes Frère-Lachaise’s head of department, to Lully Madeira, a hump-backed musician who sold his soul to the féticheur (witch-doctor), in return for fame and glory.
Mabanckou immerses us in Liwa’s tale, creating the uncanny sense of a corpse communing with his sentient self. The three parts never fully coalesce, but Mabanckou interweaves horror and gallows humour to great effect, the shifts in tone are beautifully controlled, and his prose is rendered into exquisite English by Stevenson.
• Dealing With the Dead by Alain Mabanckou (translated by Helen Stevenson) is published by Serpent’s Tail (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
