Samantha Ellis
Problems of Living
The Lights of Pointe-Noire
By Alain Mabanckou (Translated by Helen Stevenson)
Serpent’s Tail 202pp £8.99 order from our bookshop
The Utopia Experiment
By Dylan Evans
Picador 274pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness
By Sy Montgomery
Simon & Schuster 261pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
‘For a long time,’ writes the novelist Alain Mabanckou, ‘I let people think my mother was still alive’, a lie that ‘only served to postpone my mourning’. He didn’t go to her funeral, despite his family’s fury. In this memoir, he returns to Pointe-Noire, the city in the Republic of Congo where he grew up, and where his mother, who was abandoned by the man she was going to marry, could live as ‘a woman from nowhere’. He meets prostitutes, chancers, and countless nieces and nephews. His half-brother turns up at a reading, wasted and determined to grab the microphone. He finds that his old school has been named after a French colonial who ran a slave racket and that his mother’s cousin, a ladies’ man nicknamed the Grand Poupy, has married a woman he once adored.
He writes about all this in short, inconclusive chapters that seem initially a bit disconnected. It’s not just the prose; Mabanckou, too, seems oddly detached. At first I found this frustrating – especially because it didn’t seem to frustrate him. Then I realised that the moment I was waiting for – the encounter, the epiphany, the madeleine – was never going to come and
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger