Broken Glass, by Alain Mabanckou

Alain Mabanckou (Sipa)

Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou is known for his original, provocative contributions to contemporary francophone literature. Broken Glass, a novel published in 2005, centers on the eponymous “hero” of the novel, a man who spends most of his waking hours drinking red wine at a bar called Credit Gone West in a poor district of Congo, and recording his observations, as well as the stories of the various derelicts who visit the bar, in a notebook he receives from the bar’s owner, Stubborn Snail. The novel is a patchwork of observations about postmodern life in a region of Africa that was colonized by the French for decades. Broken Glass himself embodies the cultural hybridity and “clashing of worlds” that one can expect from a character in his position. He is a “man of letters” whose cultural frame of reference spans from the French carnivalesque (a scene featuring a urinating contest alludes to Francois Rabelais) and modern American literature (Holden Caulfield makes an appearance at the end of the novel).

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Yet Broken Glass is impoverished and immobilized the crisis of life around him. Like the rambling narration, which is full of commas but lacks even a single period-- Broken Glass’s life lacks boundaries, and there is never any closure to the sufferings of his present, or his past. Every crisis of his life is resurrected-- his mother’s death, the villainous tendencies of his wife Angelica, who Broken Glass refers to as Diabolica. Broken Glass’s rambling is discursive, and interesting-- because it is brilliant, but it is also precarious because it is impossible to tell where his words will eventually lead us. At the end we discover that in fact, they have led us nowhere. We get dozens of energetic references to cultural events from all over the world, and we observe that our minds have been stimulated and that our curiosity has been piqued. As a reader, this leaves me breathless. Often in a discomfiting way. It’s like losing oneself in a sea of rich imagery, then emerging to discover that they were just passing themes, too rootless to leave me with a dominant lasting impression. The plot of Broken Glass is driven by the stories Broken Glass tells about other characters, which I think is a fascinating technique for integrating other narratives (and references to other places) into a story about a man whose life is essentially immobile-- though he is mentally quite agile. The central conflict is Broken Glass’s inability to reconcile his cosmopolitan mind with the stagnant, disaster-ridden world of life for a penniless man in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has been educated however, and he gets endless mileage as a thinker and a dreamer from the books he has read. But in the context of the novel, Broken Glass’s only hope for mental escape is through the stories he tells about other people. By “possessing” the histories of others, Broken Glass in turn becomes a “man of the world,” without ever leaving home. Ultimately, I admire Alain Mabanckou for trumping the conventions of literature from all over the world, from every epoch of history, to write a story that has never been written before.