Tram 83 -- Summer Book 13

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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.




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

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