Albert Russo

Reviewed by Professor and Ambassador Moshe Liba in then Taj Mahal REview, India

ECLIPSE OVER LAKE TANGANYIKA, by Albert Russo, 2000, Domhan Books - USA/UK; Published in French in the author’s own version as ECLIPSE SUR LE LAC TANGANYIKA,Nouvel Athanor, Paris, France; Published in Holland as :SCHEMERING OVER HET TANGANYIKAMEER,Element Uitgevers, Nederlands This book was nominated for The 2000 International Frankfurt Book Avards This novel has the ingredients of an African and a Greek tragedy at once and the author had initially thought of calling it : PRINCES AND GODS. Albert Russo does not care about local colour. The vegetation, the words in Kiswahili, the places serve the purpose for a single man's confrontation with “Creation”. Every page shows the author’s fascination for the Eden-like land and his sadness of what men made of it. The story, based on historical events, is set in Rwanda-Urundi, till 1962 under Belgian rule. The action takes place in Buja, the capital overlooking Lake Tanganyika. The time is before Independence. The population is constituted of Tutsi, a minority ruling over the majority of the land: the Hutu. This is the reason for internal pressures, about to explode. Two main factions fight for power: the hard line Prince Ruego, and the pro-Western Hutu. Here are the main characters, African and foreigners: Hutu, Tutsi, Belgians , Greeks, and an American youth. They all fight for the favours of Damiana, the wife of the Greek merchant Antoniades. So, we meet a Belgian police officer, another Greek, Stavros, the owner of the local cinema, the Mwami- king himself, and the main actor on this scene, Oswald, a young American paramedic working at the Evangelical mission. From the love affairs of Damiana, the author brings us to the political plots, the arrests, the intrigues and the killings. The main victim becomes none other than the Prince, who is shot by Stavros, the latter tries to fly away, but his car breaks down on the way to the airport, and he is given a lift by none other than the king himself, the Prince’s father. The Mwami discovers the plot, and the Hutu conspirators are executed, including the two Greeks. Witnessing all of this, Oswald,who has come all the way from America, full of humanitarian projects and ideals, is shattered. As Martin Tucker wrote: Albert Russo is distinguished by his startlingly precise grasp of the historic period of mid-twentieth-century Central Africa. In this sense, his work bears twinship to the work of the Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul’s novel “A bend in the River”… (meer)

A hilarious, irreverent romp through the life of a child of the 90's! Set in Paris and Northern Italy [refers to the first 3 volumes], the work shows us the world through the eyes of Zapinette, a little girl who is smart, quick-witted, accepting and dazzling. Russo's use of slang language and spelling is just plain fun! The book is done in the stream of consciousness of a child and jumps from subject to subject providing a very detailed, if not explainable, roadmap through a child's thought process. A fun and enjoyable book. Give yourself and a friend a smile – buy and share this work! [As reviewed by Leslie Blanchard in A Writer's Choice Literary Magazine (USA… (meer)

Reviewed in World Literature Today by Jean-Luc Breton

Albert Russo has managed to avoid the two pitfalls of the writer of sequels, duplication and inflation. The child narrator Zapinette à New York is just as natural as she was in Zapinette Vidéo, but she has grown sightly older. She has gradually come to terms with her femininity and her desires, she no longer feels humiliated at being looked at in the streets, and, at the end of the novel, she is even able to fall in love. In Zapinette Vidéo, she had told her readers that she would never even dream of writing books, now she poses as a writer, basks in her success and asks her readers to keep their eyes open for her (possible) third novel.

What Zapinette, and indeed all children, cannot easily get reconciled with is that the adults who love them also tend to love other people or things, which she invariably calls boring or disgusting. Her uncle's love of opera was unbearable to her when they were in Verona, now in New York, what she cannot stand is mainly the people they meet, especially Uncle Albéric's former girlfriends (one is said to have a physique "full of ungratefulness" and a nose like a hangar) and the young men who stare at him in too tender or too explicit a fashion.

And then, one day, she finds herself confronted to "her exact copy", in the shape of a boy from Staten Island, with whom she is going to discover the narcissistic pleasure of falling in love, which she called "narcisserie" (a word that surely rhymes with "charcuterie"). She then forgets about her worried mother in Paris and even gives up being her uncle's chaperone in the Big Apple, and indulges in the pleasure of loving and being loved, not only a boy but a whole family and a whole culture.

Obviously, the change is too sudden and fresh for her to be able to analyze it, but we, her readers, at the end of Zapinette à New York, simply feel that the aim of her travels was mainly to bring the girl back to her original narcissism, with the difference that now she is able to share it with another person, which is after all what most of us usually call "love".
Jean-Luc Breton… (meer)

'Albert Russo, il romanziere del patchwork riuscito',
di Jean-Luc Maxence

Se il tempo potesse sospendere il proprio volo, secondo le arti conosciute dai poeti, noi saremmo nel 1975 e io ritroverei un bel giovanotto sorridente ed anticonformista che mi proponeva, in rue Vaneau, il suo primo manoscritto, un romanzo breve e di pregio, Mosaique newyorkaise. Mi è piaciuto al primo impatto e l’ho editato per le Editions de l’Athanor. Albert Russo, di origine angloitaliana, è nato nel 1943 nello zaire, ha vissuto diciassette anni in africa centrale e in quella australe, poi negli Stati Uniti, prima di stabilirsi in Francia dove vive tuttora. La sua opera di romanziere, apprezzata da James Baldwin e Gilles Perrault in modo particolare, è una magnifica testimonianza dell’ambiguità tragica del meticciato delle culture e lo è stata ben prima che questa espressione divenisse – con gran parte dei benpensanti – una formula vuota, senza sfumature, una risposta per tutto. Albert Russo, il romanziere, è sempre alla ricerca del pezzo mancante nel mosaico dei destini incrociati, con una limpidezza eccezionale di stile e un’efficace immaginazione, senza freni, non rinuncia mai a interrogarsi sulle ambiguità sessuali. Romanzo dopo romanzo, Russo ha saputo dare furore e vita al suo universo audace: Sangue Misto – uno dei suoi titoli di successo – difende la causa omosessuale senza cadere nella militanza dalle braccia strette e dal pensiero debole. L’Amante di mio padre, editato nel 2000, è stato forse uno dei primi romanzi che ha aperto il dibattito sui matrimoni gay. ai nostri occhi albert Russo, all’inizio di questo nuovo millennio, appare come uno dei romanzieri più interessanti, capace di commuovere, un funambolo eternamente non in equilibrio posto su un filo di parole e immagini, sospeso tra continenti antagonisti – l’Africa, l’america e l’Europa. Moi, Hans, fils de nazis si iscrive nel drittofilo dei titoli precedenti. Ha approfondito la questione dell’origine e dei segreti dell’infanzia e di quelle famiglie che così sovente portano in seno una colpa mostruosa, come una cicatrice indelebile. Da dove veniamo? Da quale mistero inconfessato? Da quale amore? Da quale colpo di fulmine ineffabile? Che cos’è un percorso di vita popolato di imprevisti e di false contraddizioni? Sono tutti questi gli interrogativi febbricitanti a cui albert Russo tenta di rispondere dandoci da leggere questo “diario” che si apre con un capitolo intitolato Fabio, la mia ossessione. Niente, come al solito, in Russo è lineare. Ma dalla prima riga fino all’ultima la storia è da batticuore, non annoia mai, e dietro alla diversità delle culture e alle violenze umane, non solamente fisiche, c’è il mistero primordiale dell’Uomo che si rivela attraverso i desideri contradditori dei corpi e l’apparente assurdità della vita stessa.… (meer)