Review: "Black Moses" by Alain Mabanckou

Most years my reading list revolves around certain obsessions I have, or things that pique my interest. For the past few years, that interest has been new books, book released during the given year. This year, I have modified that a bit to focus more on international writers with translation released during the given year. It has been a great strategy so far, because it brings in contact with some very interesting and phenomenal writers, such as the Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou, whose novel Black Moses was released this year and I just finished tonight. Simply put, it’s a stunning achievement, the kind of book that is easy to get lost in, to follow along with and have your heart broken by. With flighty but not weighty prose, a strong sense of character and a weird slight of hand that Mabanckou pulls more than once during the book’s slim 199 pages, this story of a young boy’s journey through a corrupt and lonely landscape becomes almost biblical in nature, much like the name of the young boy himself. It is a brutal story and one of the saddest I’ve come across this year, but it has an undeniable energy that flows through the pages that acts as a sort of shock to the reader’s system. The eponymous character (whose name is A LOT longer than “Black Moses”, which I won’t spell out here) lives Loango, an orphanage in Point Noire, the second largest city in the Republic of Congo. He was left there a week after he was born and he was given his name by Papa Moupelo, the orphanage’s priest. The book charts his coming of age and the turmoil of his country (with little moments of melancholia denoting certain political aspects), as he eventually escapes and moves about the city’s underworld, suffering sad loss after sad loss, which leads to the change of pace near the end that culminates in an act of violence and an ending that is depressingly appropriate. Reading through this book, I couldn’t help but think of Black Moses as a distant cousin to characters like Francie Brady in The Butcher Boy and Balram Halwai of The White Tiger, each one a young boy out of time who come of age in harsh environments that never quite understand them, who navigate the cruel world around them as best as they can with varying degrees of success. Along with a great narrative drive, the character’s Mabanckou creates are magnificent, ranging from the brutal bureaucratic director of the orphanage Dieudonne Ngoulmoumako, the pair of twins Moses escapes with, Old Koukouba, the caretaker of the orphanage with a grim backstory and finally Bonaventure, Moses truest friend at the orphanage, whose lineage is wrapped up with the country’s changing political landscape and whose spirit haunts the book up to its final few pages. This is a great literary work of history and humanity; exciting, funny and grim all at the same time, from an international writer I can’t wait to dive into again.

Rating: 5/5