Over at the Economist:
More hereWhy Alain Mabanckou is a novelist to watch
Black Moses. By Alain Mabanckou. Translated by Helen Stevenson. Serpent’s Tail; 199 pages; £12.99. To be published in America by the New Press in June.
HOW wonderfully typical of an Alain Mabanckou character to fall sick because of a syntactic error. After the few ups and many downs of life as a friendless orphan in the Republic of Congo, Little Pepper, the narrator of “Black Moses”, sinks into delirium. Taken to a Paris-trained psychologist, he insists: “I’m ill because of my adverbials.” Adrift from “time, place or manner”, he cannot “complete the action expressed by the verb”.
