Tram 83 -- Summer Book 13

By -
Tram 83, by Fiston Mwanza Mujila

If you're reading around the world, you should probably not expect sweetness and light from your Democratic Republic of the Congo pick, and indeed I did not.  Good thing too, because it was pretty relentlessly grim.  I can't say that I enjoyed it -- I don't think it was supposed to be enjoyed, it's not that kind of novel -- but there were one or two things I liked.

Fiston Mwanza Mujila is Congolese but now lives in Austria, teaching African literature.  Tram 83 was his first novel and got lots of attention and acclaim.

Tram 83 is not a bus, or a station.  It's a nightclub, the nightclub, in an unnamed African "City-State" where everything has long ago fallen apart, except for the mines and the crime.  Everyone congregates at Tram 83 -- the gangsters and prostitutes and the for-profit tourists.  Requiem is a gang leader, renowned and ambitious; his childhood friend, Lucien, has returned from abroad and is working on his writing.  (If he can just produce something, he'll be published abroad and will have it made.)  Nobody else has any time for this writing nonsense, and Lucien pays a heavy price for his eccentricity, while Requiem also has his setbacks, but has every intention of coming back stronger than before.

All the men, with the odd and despised exception of Lucien, are criminals.  All the women are prostitutes.  There is nothing else for any of them to live on, and no hope for anything different than a constant round of violence and crime.

Requiem's minions have some pretty good names, though:
Requiem was waiting for him, accompanied by eight men, all with evocative names: Dragon, Mortal Combat, Free Kick, Dysentery, Invincible Measles, and so on.* 
I would like everybody to call me Invincible Measles from now on, please. 

I'm not sure what to think of this novel.  I didn't much like it, but then Mujila probably didn't want people to like it.  The back blurbs say it's funny as well as serious, but I didn't find it so.  It is, to my mind, a very guy novel and makes me want to go looking for a novel written by a Congolese woman, which I think would probably interest me much more.




____________________________________________
*Dysentery also gave me a laugh, since that was the name of my brothers' punk band back in the day.

Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more