Stubborn Snail, the publican of the 24-hour saloon, gives a notebook to his loyal patron Broken Glass, urging him to write “a book about us, a book about this place, there’s no other place like it on earth.’’ Broken Glass’s idiosyncratic chronicle of Credit Gone West and of his own life before settling there is rendered with a suitably gimlet eye.
A defeated, urbane school teacher, Broken Glass often invokes literary or cultural figures. Lest readers mistake Congo for a backwater, Mabanckou nods to Marcel Proust, Cato the Elder, Karl Marx, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Frantz Fanon, Ernest Hemingway, André Brink, and Miles Davis. A character who calls himself Holden Caulfield makes a brief, befuddled appearance at the bar.
It’s difficult to characterize Mabanckou’s spirited, audacious writing without also name dropping. His style combines a wild mélange of Moliere’s edgy parody, Gertrude Stein’s breathless sentences, Salman Rushdie’s manic logorrhea, Ben Okri’s cultural ambivalence, and Gilbert Sorrentino’s postmodern wackiness. He displays these diverse impulses in a book that contains no periods, that is, in fact, one long sentence fragment.
“Broken Glass’’ reads like a twisted “Canterbury Tales’’ in which each pilgrim’s journey is a rapid alcoholic descent toward inner demons. One by one, Broken Glass considers his wretched neighbors for whom he sees no redemption, repair, or salvage. Whether naively hopeful or fatalistic, all are doomed, for Broken Glass agrees with Sartre that there is no exit.
Pampers is a pathetic man who, like his fellow patrons, has been kicked out by his wife. He calls the fire department to help him break into his house, but his wife wins the round, concocting a story about his incest with their daughter. Frequent brutal rapes he endured in prison have left him incontinent and forced to wear adult diapers — hence the nickname. Despite being irreparably physically and emotionally damaged, he still harbors the unlikely hope that one day he’ll “go and win my wife back, we’ll have a new romance.”
