Broken Glass

I loved this book! I loved this book! I loved this book!I loved this book! I loved this book! I loved this book! Seriously though. I loved it!

This is a hard read, but worthwhile. There are a lot of references to French and African literature and politics that I'm sure I missed. And there are some pretty tough scenes as well, but there's still a lot of humor and this man know how to write. I had to stay with it all the way.

This is a quirky book with lots of clever pivots to literature, arts, politics, popular culture, religion, etc. In fact the best parts of the book are when Mabanckou goes off on a jazz like riff where he ties in unrelated things in clever ways. Here's a description of a fist fight between Broken and another damaged patron, other customers gather to witness, "....because I was Mohammed Ali and he was George Foreman, and I was floating like a butterfly, I was stinging like a bee, and he was a flat footed vegetable....." Here's a passage comparing a charismatic shaman to another showman, "...Hitchcock was a real life-size character, a talented man, a guy who could make your spine shiver just with a few birds, or a rear window, he could turn you into a psycho with a single characteristic little trick....." Broken Glass is the name of the narrator. He's a patron/hanger on/employee at the Credit Gone West Bar in the Congo. The bar owner, Stubborn Snail, asks Broken to create a chronicle of the other inhabitants. Since Broken is a former educator who's fallen on tough times he's a natural at interviewing and documenting others while keeping up with his red wine quotient. Obviously the book is rife with metaphor and it's mostly funny in a tragic way until Broken begins to tell his own story. Then it's depressing and everymanish. Mabanckou's sentences begin with small letters. Only names and places start with capitals. He doesn't use periods, words fall over one another separated by commas. Sadness repeats itself and never ends. Tragedy doesn't change, the same stories repeat. This was a difficult book to enjoy though it was clever and insightful and for all I know, in my ignorance, indicative of Africa.

This book is told in one of the most remarkable voices I've seen in a minute, and it has the best piss scene ever written. If you don't buy it, it's because you're uppity.

Call this a literary feat, a tragedy a good ramble...more than anything I found the narrator picked me up and wouldn't let me go until the last page. A short but powerful novel, full of literary/cultural allusions and laugh out loud, totally absurd scenes that form the most memorable parts of this book.

Great book, would highly recommend.

this is a novella written entirely without periods, or capital letters at the beginnings of sentences, because there aren’t any beginnings, an entire 10-page chapter can consist entirely of one run-on sentence, which makes it hard to put down because you can’t find a stopping place, though fortunately there are occasional line breaks, like maybe once every few pages anyway this guy, Broken Glass, spends all his time at the bar, having drunk himself out of a job and a wife, and the bar owner convinces him to write, so he writes about the bar and the hard-luck stories of the other patrons and eventually his own, and he and the other guys seem like pretty unreliable narrators but it is engaging on the whole, with a distinctive voice and exaggerated and unlikely stories, and the technique while a bit gimmicky mostly works and didn’t drive me as crazy as you might imagine, because it is well-written, and the author has a lot of fun peppering the text with literary allusions and titles of famous books but then it apparently ends in tragedy and I closed the book with a shrug, clearly not having emotionally invested in the story at all, and I can’t give more than 3 stars when a book doesn’t make me care about something like that, though I wouldn’t discourage you all from reading it if you can tolerate the style

the book and story is soo bad, no one in our book club could finish it.

I liked the style of writing. A cynical comedy, about small, sometimes absurd, things going in a bar. Highly recommended.

Good quality, quick.

Read it in one evening . Brilliant

I tried but this story line lost me. I couldn’t get into it! I will try again in the Spring as it was very strongly recommended and see if there was something I was missing. Susan

This novel is nothing like I have ever read before, it took a while to get into it due to the writing style and absence of full stops, but once I got into the flow of it I really enjoyed it. It feels like a very intelligent book, with numerous literary references (the majority of which went over my head!), but is also a very entertaining story and a strange combination of both hilarious and tragic. Would highly recommend if you are looking for something out of the ordinary to read.