Dealing with the Dead
The end is a new beginning for a young man named in defiance of death in Alain Mabanckou’s otherworldly novel Dealing with the Dead.
On Independence Day for the Republic of the Congo, Liwa, a hotel cook, gets dressed up, receives his first compliment, goes out dancing, meets a beautiful girl, and is dazzled. Days later, he wakes up in a cemetery that contains “as many stories as there are graves.” The sky is below him, the earth above him, and a hazy quest awaits.
With the loose guidance of ghosts who unleash their stories of bureaucratic messes and supernatural bargains, Liwa prepares to make his way back toward town in search of answers. His last memories are evasive, the minutes pass like days, and he feels like “a piece of dry wood, bobbing on the current of [his] illusions.” Even in a nation ruled by cruel men who rely on sorcerers, amulets, and dismemberments to maintain power, success somehow seems possible, though—in particular with the beautiful girl from the disco at his back.
Its prose surrealistic and unnerving, the book takes a dizzying, suspenseful traipse through the first days of Liwa’s afterlife. It fleshes out his hometown in terms of its sea salt air, ghastly presences, colonial scars, and economic inequalities. In wealthy neighborhoods, people watch outsiders’ faces, memorizing their lines for criminal reports; in Liwa’s own, busier neighborhood, where he was raised by his formidable grandmother, he sees “boutiques squeezed tightly together, the women selling roasted peanuts, mood balls, fried fish, the squabbles in the house plots, and cars stuck in the mud.” It’s an atmosphere in which people respect matriarchies, magic, and holy men, where Liwa both feels at home and doesn’t.
A spectral intercessor heads toward a fated meeting in the wonder-filled, phantasmagorical novel Dealing with the Dead.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
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