Our narrator, a regular at the Congolese watering hole Credit Gone West, goes by the name Broken Glass. And Broken Glass has a task set for him by the bar’s owner, Stubborn Snail: to record in a notebook the history of Credit Gone West, its proprietor and its patrons.

Broken Glass has other ideas, though, as he writes early on, “I don’t intend to spare him or anyone else.” And so, writing in a manic style, Broken Glass slashes and burns his way through government ineptitude, the sad lives of the regulars and his own disappointing existence.

Each chapter is written in one long, rollicking sentence, a perfect medium for Mabanckou’s irreverent humour. But Broken Glass – the book or the character, take your pick – is also obsessed with idiom, and Mabanckou forces the reader to chew on it like jerky. The names of characters and places that are so symbolic they’re almost meaningless, the near-ubiquitous meal of “bicycle chicken” and the advent of a new national catchphrase, brought on by the minister of agriculture’s stirring speech, in which he incants, “I accuse.”

So much of the African literature that finds its way to our shores – Broken Glass is translated from the French – is concerned with the devastation of wars and soldiering. While those same politics inform this book, they’re played for laughs. Instead we get a ride through the smaller, personal devastations of individuals, which is always the stuff of great novels.

Jonathan Messinger