Fiston Mwanza MujilaAnmeldelser

Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 is a very raw portrait of a post-Colonial state tucked into south central Africa. Tram 83 itself seems to be a bar or whorehouse near a railway station anchoring the urban wasteland between miners and soldiers and tourists, although not the class of tourist one would expect in Miami Beach or Disneyworld,

The dialogue between Lucien, a writer, and Requiem, his pal/agent, is flinty.

Jazz blasts from the stage. Scantily-clad waitresses deliver cold beer and liquor to the tables. Prostitutes and their clientele rotate endlessly in the washrooms.

I am reminded of the super-realism of Bulgakov, or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, or Daniel Dafoe’s London. A funny but nightmarish landscape of broken down institutions, violence, and crooked cops.

It seems only to come alive at night.

I almost expect Anthony Bourdain to pop up with a voice-over “I just happened to meet an old friend along the way to the charming neighbourhood bordellos...”

Ouf, ça c’est une écoute éprouvante. La prose de Fiston Mwanza Mujila va à cent à l’heure, elle peut être vulgaire, est très souvent provocante et pleine d’images et de métaphores qui ne laissent aucun répit au lecteur. Il y a une telle rage de tout changer, un tel besoin de dénoncer. Dénoncer l’absence de perspective, la vie prise dans un engrenage de misère, dénoncer un climat politique et social étouffant…
Je ne suis pas le genre de lectrice pour ce genre de texte. Comme j’en ai écouté une adaptation radiophonique, je me suis accrochée et je suis allée au bout. Je ne le regrette pas car c’est une expérience certes éprouvante mais pas sans intérêt. Je suis contente de l’avoir menée à terme, mais je ne conseillerai pas ce livre à n’importe qui. Il faut aimer les allégories, et il faut aimer les textes qui partent dans tous les sens et débordent d’une vitalité qui ne peut s’exprimer aussi pleinement que dans les arts et la littérature.

Playwright Lucien arrives in the City-State, the stronghold of a dissident General where desperate people scrabble a living centred on the sleazy nightclub Tram 83. The denizens of Tram 83 are musicians, hookers, miners, tourists and other low-lives.

Lucien shacks up with local hood Requiem while he tries to get his magnum opus published. Requiem does his best to play Lucien, as well as everybody else.

Mujila uses language artfully to convey the bustle and hassling of Tram 83, where nobody can conduct a conversation without being hassled by half a dozen chancers. There is a good concept underlying this novel; the problem is that I just could not get interested in Lucien as a protagonist. He's a lame, feeble, ineffectual cypher, not enough to build the novel around. A novel with Requiem as the protagonist and Lucien as a minor character would have been much more fun.

220 pages of text with little to no literature quality. Hectic, confusing, repetitive and boring. Meaningless time shifts, absurd plot. One of the worst books I ever came across.

For the most part more of a narrative poem (or a philosophical rant with poetic aspirations) than a novel, somewhat disjointed and abstract at times, but definitely a satisfying read throughout.

I was almost going to give it just three or even two stars at certain points, but the ending really won me over. Nice.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

Many people have spoken to the poetic nature of this book's text. I agree, in both the good sense...the author's (and crucially the translator's) ear for the heightened meanings of words used in poetry is always adding a bass line to this melody...and the bad, that being the obfuscatory and often obscurantist requirement for the reader to unpack subtexts and discover new senses for familiar words while mid-read.

The City-State is one of those territories that have already broken through the barrier of internal suffering. You share the same destiny as everyone else, the same history, the same hardship, the same trains, the same Tram beer, the same dog kebabs, the same narrative as soon as you come into the world. You start out baby-chick or slim-jim or child soldier. You graduate to endlessly striking student or desperado. If you've got family on the trains, then you work on the trains; otherwise, like a ship, you wash up on the edge of hope - a suicidal, a carjacker, a digger with dirty teeth, a mechanic, a street sleeper, a commission agent, an errand boy employed by for-profit tourists, a hawker of secondhand coffins. Your fate is already sealed, the route marked out in advance. Fate sealed like that of the locomotives carrying spoiler merchandise and the dying.

It's not an impossible task. It's often uncomfortable, and it's always a way of slowing the reader down. That isn't always a bad thing. It can feel sort of like the author is being pedantic, the repetition of variants on "You have the time?" is my favorite example. The time to disport yourself with a prostitute. The time to listen to a song. The time as spending, a transaction, an exchange of money for value or attention for money; the issue at hand isn't that it's hard to do this work but that it's required. Read cold, flat, without investment other than decoding, there is no through-line of story to receive. It is a list of lists, a repetition of phrases and names and all strung on a thin cord of criticism for capitalist society's multi-level destruction of the characters. That isn't a terribly satisfying read; and the fact that it is in itself a sharp critique of the mental laziness of many readers is a bit off-putting.

The Northern Station was going to the dogs. It was essentially an unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks, and locomotives that called to mind the railroad built by Stanley, cassava fields, cut-rate hotels, greasy spoons, bordellos, Pentecostal churches, bakeries, and noise engineered by men of all generations and nationalities combined. It was the only place on earth you could hang yourself, defecate, blaspheme, fall into infatuation, and thieve without regard to prying eyes.

So much is inside the world of Tram 83 that it can feel as overwhelming as a physical trip to Africa does to many Westerners. For the whitest among us, the experience of being a vanishingly small minority is so unsettling as to be agony. For that reason I want many many US whites to read it; I recognize the futility of that wish but am stubbornly advocating it. It's the end of 2020. The world has changed because of COVID-19. It is long past time people with our First-World privilege, regular garbage pick-up and grocery stores and paved roads, heard about the reality of the rest of the world in their own words.

Eyes shrivelled by cigarettes and alcohol. Potbellies full to bursting with roundworms, amoebas, earthworms, and assorted mollusks. Heads shaved with knives. Arms and legs stiff with digging graves from morning till morning. They were close to ten, maybe twelve years old. They toted the same justifications: “We’re doing this to pay for our studies. Dad’s already gone with the locomotives. He doesn’t write no more. Mom’s sick. The uncles and aunts and grandmothers say we’re sorcerers and it’s because of that dad got married a third time and that our sorcery comes from our mom and that we should go to see the preachers who will cut the links by getting us to swallow palm oil to make us vomit up our sorcery and prevent us flying round at night.” They lived off a multitude of rackets, like all the kids in town.

They worked as porters at the Northern Station, and on the Congo River and at the Central Market, as slim-jims in the mines, errand boys at Tram 83, undertakers, and gravediggers. The more sensitive ones stood guard at the greasy spoons abutting the station, whose metal structure recalled the 1885s, in exchange for a bowl of badly boiled beans.

What I want from white people like me reading this thunderflash of words, this uncappable well of natural story-gas, is that we stop and do the work of being in fellowship with the world that isn't like us. Because that surface difference, as this intense and unmissable read says and shows, means nothing against the deepest human need of all: To connect and commune with Humanity. As cheesy as that sounds, this really is the take-away I hope you'll have when you spend a day immersed in Tram 83.½

Faced paced and chaotic story of urban central Africa. Greed, corruption, instability, and a shady club set the stage for this novel. The English edition is published by Deep Velum Press.

Not read for review.

An overwhelming tumult of language, something like being pulled under by a big ocean wave and sent tumbling. The story itself was secondary to the feeling. It's a very male book. Also overwhelming was the endless stream of women's commodified bodies being described by their parts--women were defined in the story by what men see, what men touch. I was in turn riveted, repulsed, bored, amazed, wrenched around.

Tranvía 83 se desarrolla en un indeterminado país africano que vive, a la vez que una profunda recesión, una nueva fiebre del oro. Turistas de todas las nacionalidades y lenguas llegan a la Ciudad-País con un único deseo: hacer fortuna explotando la riqueza mineral escondida en las entrañas de esa tierra. Por el día trabajan en las minas, y por la noche se reúnen para beber, comer y bailar en el club Tranvía 83, una auténtica guarida de forajidos poblada por antiguos niños soldados, turistas con ánimo de lucro, prostitutas, madres solteras, aprendices de brujo… y por Lucien, un escritor que, huyendo de las extorsiones y la censura, encuentra refugio en Ciudad-País e intenta seguir allí su recto camino de afirmación de su escritura, mientras los personajes más turbios del lugar gravitan a su alrededor.

Tranvía 83 ha sido considerada como uno de los últimos y más brillantes fenómenos culturales en lengua francesa, razón por la que ha sido traducida a idiomas como el inglés, alemán, italiano, catalán, griego, lituano, árabe, neerlandés, sueco, hebreo, sueco y danés, y ha cosechado los elogios de la crítica en todos y cada uno de los países en los que ha sido publicada.

Esta celebrada novela, construida con un ritmo y una creatividad completamente nuevas, ha sido descrita como un rap africano, una novela-rapsodia, o una novela puzle cincelada a ritmo de jazz. Pero es algo más: es una auténtica fiesta para la imaginación

This one was hard to finish. Not my style is putting it mildly. More plot, please. More character development, please.

La copertina – dettaglio di un quadro del congolese Chéri Chérin – offre una buona introduzione all’atmosfera di questo romanzo. Per parte sua, l’autore ha dichiarato in interviste di aver avuto in mente l’opera di un altro pittore della Rd Congo, il murale di Chéri Samba che troneggia a Matonge, il più congolese e africano dei quartieri della capitale belga (e che perfino nel nome è memoria di un vivace quartiere di Kinshasa). A dire il vero, fin dalle primissime pagine veniamo catapultati in un universo ancor più affollato, caotico, amorale, “sbracato”, di quanto non lasci prevedere il preludio pittorico. Siamo nella Città-Paese, dietro cui si estende l’Entroterra, governata da un «Generale dissidente»; una sorta di Stato fondato sull’estrazione dei minerali preziosi, al cui vertice svetta il Generale, ma sui cui traffici si muovono «turisti a scopo di lucro» piombati da ogni angolo di mondo. Il libro però non è un thriller politico o qualcosa di simile, bensì il racconto di uno squarcio di vita della fauna umana che si concentra fra la stazione dei treni – «una struttura metallica monca, demolita dalle granate», che rimemora la ferrovia «costruita da Stanley» – e, soprattutto, un locale che richiama i saloon da western, ma più in grande, più rumoroso e più sordido: il Tram 83.
Il Tram 83 è dunque un palcoscenico di umanità varia, che l’autore si diverte anche a elencare per categorie – ma, in fondo, non così varia. Tutti appaiono gaiamente ma inesorabilmente ossessionati dalla birra, dal denaro, dal «bassoventre». E infatti sono ben più che un contorno le pattuglie di ragazze, giovanissime o più mature, che petulantemente propongono/impongono i propri servigi sessuali agli avventori.
Unico personaggio dissonante è Lucien, uno scrittore idealista appena arrivato dall’Entroterra e che ritrova un suo vecchio compagno di studi, detto Requiem, che invece degli ideali si è disfatto da un pezzo per trasformarsi in un’avanguardia del cinismo. Il romanzo ha un suo intreccio, naturalmente, ma più ancora di esso rimane nella mente del lettore l’atmosfera di questo pezzo di far west (non a caso Requiem ama citare il Nuovo Messico) in cui si è tramutato un angolo d’Africa contagiato dalla nuova febbre dell’oro. O della pietra. «In principio era la pietra e la pietra provocò il possesso e il possesso la corsa al minerale» è l’incipit del romanzo d’esordio di questo poeta e autore di teatro originario di Lubumbashi, da diversi anni residente in Austria.
La scrittura è in sintonia con il clima della narrazione, soprattutto nei dialoghi, spesso interrotti, ripresi, con nuovi interlocutori non presentati e, sempre, il «Sa l’ora?» di una ragazzotta che tenta un approccio. L’altro espediente è quello dell’accumulo, come quando vengono declinati tutti i soprannomi del “Negus” Requiem. Importante è anche il ruolo della musica, che, con tutte le voci e gli altri rumori, rende Tram 83 un romanzo particolarmente sonoro. E, sottotraccia ma non troppo, emergono frammenti di riflessione sul ruolo dello scrittore nella società (ma Fiston sostiene, nelle interviste che rilascia, di essere più «pragmatico» del suo Lucien).
Un libro con una sua forza, per non dire violenza, che può respingere come attrarre. Che può essere visto come una caricatura grottesca, o un fumetto senza disegni. Oppure (e le cose non necessariamente si elidono l’un l’altra) come uno sguardo allegramente senza speranza su una società dominata dalla corsa alla pietra, dove «tutte le strade portano al Tram 83».

This is a sordid, vibrant, and even comical story set at a nightclub in the heart of a mining district in an unnamed town in the DRC. The challenge in reading the novel lies in the translation. [I would have loved to have had a French copy on hand for certain passages that did not come across as clean or as lyrical as I suspect they were in the original.]

Decadence, beat,

A feverish burst of slam-poetry yelled in your ear over pounding music, so close and so loud you can practically feel the spittle hitting your face. Reading these dispatches from the sharp end of globalisation is like being hit by an undammed river of language – rhythmic, sinuous, dirty, improvisational, perspiring but also weirdly inspiring.

The setting is a nameless ‘city-state’ in central Africa which exists in de-facto secession, run by a Kabila-like ‘dissident General’ busy exploiting the region's mineral resources. The rest of the inhabitants live their short lives in a Hobbesian nightmare of near-total lawlessness and lack of infrastructure, fitting into a limited number of social strata: mine workers, students, ‘for-profit tourists’, and the underage prostitutes known in this book's patois as ‘ducklings’ (canetons). It sounds depressing, but despite the very serious realities being described, the primary feeling is one of exuberance and of messy, creative, insuppressible life.

The main reason for this is Mwanza Mujila's prose style, which is designed to mimic the author's beloved jazz music – he's said he wanted his novel to be a literary version of Coltrane's Giant Steps (Mwanza Mujila would probably have been a musician himself, were it not for the inconvenience that Lubumbashi has no music school or saxophone). ‘Pour moi, la langue française, c'est comme un orchestre de jazz,’ he told one interviewer, and he's used the instruments available to him incredibly well, stringing together these long, comma-spliced, elegiac, almost Kerouac-esque riffs:

les nuits étaient un bonheur pour ceux qui savaient en profiter, les vraies nuits étaient longues et populaires, les vraies nuits étaient toujours événementielles, les vraies nuits n'échappaient plus à la corruption et autres coups bas, les vraies nuits puaient la névralgie, les crachats et traumatismes de ceux qui construisaient ce beau monde cassé…

[…the nights were a joy to those who knew how to take advantage of them, the true nights were long and belonged to the people, the true nights were always events, the true nights didn't run from corruption and other below-the-belt activities, the true nights stank of the neuralgia, gobs of spit and injuries of those who were creating this beautiful broken world…]

At the centre of it all, the city in microcosm, is the eponymous Tram 83 (which I hear in my head in a heavy accent, tram kat van twa!), a bar-cum-brothel-cum-greasy spoon which goes straight into the top ten of greatest literary drinking halls. A small, shabby stage with a band playing bebop or Congolese rumba; waitresses and busgirls supplying Brazzaville beer and dogmeat kebabs; catatonic miners and Chinese tourists; and, circling, the ‘ducklings’, teen mothers and assorted ‘no-knicker girls’ (filles-sans-calbars) trying to drag men off for a quick, remunerative assignation in the mixed-sex toilets. The girls' patter is forever interrupting the narrative prose, from the standard approach – ‘You got the time?’ – which is crowbarred into the text again and again, to more elaborate comments and flirtations: ‘Foreplay to me is like democracy. If you don't touch me right, I'm calling in the Americans.’

Mwanza Mujila took the name of his bar from a late-night Brussels tramline, which immediately makes me want to transpose it in my head to the N3, the bus I got home from London every Saturday night throughout my adolescence. I love the idea of naming a bar after a transport route, and in this case it's especially meaningful because of how central the idea of train lines, in particular, are – remembering always that while in Europe trains often represent progress and development, in Africa they come instead with colonial connotations of forced labour, exploitation and deportation. He tries to incorporate this history, both by referring to it directly (the city's train station ‘brings to mind the railway line built by Stanley’), and also by slipping into a certain trainlike rhythm – among other things, Tram 83 is determinedly ‘locomotive literature’.

The novel's setting is somewhat exaggerated, no doubt, but I suspect critics have underestimated the extent to which it faithfully reproduces Lubumbashi, which throughout much of both Congo Wars, and for that matter earlier, too, perfectly fitted the book's description of ‘une ville devenue pays par la force des kalachnikovs’. Certainly it won't do to imply (as some critics have seemed at risk of doing) that this is a flight of fancy – what makes this book important as well as viscerally entertaining is that this world, with all its frenetic violence and grotesque gender polarisation, is real and moreover is the flipside of our own western lifestyle.

What Tram 83 is actually showing us is the consequences of producing seventy million iPhones a year: this is what it comes down to, quite literally – the coltan in all these modern gadgets is dug up right here by people who can expect to die in their mid-forties. Mwanza Mujila has taken that basic obscenity and made great literature out of it.½

This novel is set in an African city-state which is filled with a mixture of young prostitutes, foreigners seeking fortune and pleasure, older prostitutes, hustlers, drug dealers and con men, teenage prostitutes, university students and bitter young men, prostitutes of undetermined age, and politicians, philosophers and prognosticators. (Did I mention prostitutes?) The favored meeting place of night goers is Tram 83, a club in which jazz is constantly playing, beer and hard liquor are readily available, and any attempt at conversation is interrupted by prostitutes asking for the time of day.

The book is centered on two paper thin characters, Requiem, a local hustler, and his old friend Lucien, a failed history professor and writer, who has come from the Back Country to see Requiem and to improve his fortune. Lucien meets a Swiss book publisher in Tram 83, who promises to help him back on his feet, provided that he is willing to adapt his work to fit the public's demand, while Requiem spends his days making deals and availing himself of the baby-chicks and single-mamas who vie for his attention, and his money.

The story is almost completely lacking in plot or structure and is mind-numbingly repetitive, and after 60 pages I skimmed through the rest of it to find out what happened to the main characters. Tram 83 has been chosen as a finalist for several literary awards, including the Man Booker International Prize and the Best Translated Book Award, and includes an effusive praise filled foreword from Alain Mabanckou, one of my favorite living African authors. However, I found the book to be incredibly overblown and overhyped, and although it may reflect the reality of a lawless place like the Democratic Republic of the Congo this book doesn't provide any insight into the people that live in cities like this one. Don't waste your time reading this dreadful book.½

Although I found this book really hard to follow, I did find it to be an enjoyable journey though a mythical yet very believable atmosphere. It reminded me of all the bars I ever visited in Africa and did an excellent job of describing and characterizing all the patrons of this particular bar. However, there was little to no character development and although the plot focused on two characters I can't really recall what their story was or why it mattered.½

I don't really get the high praise that this book has received in certain quarters. It's a fairly atmospheric read, but VERY repetitive, and weak on story if story is what you're after.

Set in a made-up African city-state somewhere in the Congo region. Gritty tale of a mix of locals, ex-pats, and wanderers: the exploiters and the exploited. A great read. Personal copy.