Maya Jaggi writing in the Guardian:
More hereAlain Mabanckou, a novelist of exuberant originality, started a literary festival in Congo-Brazzaville this year. It opened in a stately house overlooking the Congo river, built for Charles de Gaulle's exile from Nazi-occupied Paris, when equatorial Africa was the heart of free France. As Michel, the 10-year-old narrator of Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty, grasps this history: "General de Gaulle came to Brazzaville to announce that France was no longer in France, that the capital of France was no longer Paris, with the Eiffel Tower – Brazzaville was now the capital of free France. So the French all became Congolese like us."
Such refreshing logic pervades this delightful comic novel in which the boy narrator's ingenuousness is teamed with a sly authorial wit. Mabanckou writes what resembles memoir while taking the liberties of fiction: in many respects, this is his own 1970s childhood in what was then the People's Republic of Congo. Bigger, ex-Belgian Congo across the river was still Mobutu's Zaire (though as Michel thinks, "the smaller a country, the bigger its problems").
