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Bezig met laden... Tomorrow I'll Be Twentydoor Alain Mabanckou
  
Bezig met laden...
 Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek.   ) ephemeral_future | Aug 20, 2020 |  This is the corny old trick of looking at the adult world through the naïve and (accidentally-on-purpose) ironic gaze of a child narrator, something that can soon become irritating if handled clumsily, especially in a book of this length. Mabanckou is obviously aware of the pitfalls of the technique, and dances around them with supreme confidence. The book leaps from mood to mood and topic to topic unpredictably, with characters and storylines coming and going, bits of backstory or inserted narratives hopping in from nowhere when we're least expecting them. We scarcely get a chance to complain that we're fed up with Michel's voice, there's so much else going on around him, and - until it's too late to do anything about it - we don't even get the idea that we are in a carefully constructed narrative that's heading for a pre-planned conclusion. Very clever. One of the important threads in the book is Michel's attempt to work out where he is in the world, culturally and politically. How does his modern urban experience tie into the stories of traditional village life he hears from his elders? how to resolve the communist rhetoric he hears from his teachers and Uncle René with the culture of buying and selling he lives in? how does all that fit into the francophone culture he's been told he has a stake in as well? and why is everyone being so nasty to the poor Shah when the nasty Idi Amin is living in comfort in Saudi Arabia? None of it makes very much obvious sense, and some of it is there mostly to give Mabanckou scope for faux-naïve jokes about world leaders (like Pompidou and Brezhnev, who have "beaucoup de sourcils" to deal with), but Michel is growing up, and he starts to find some tangible threads to follow in all the mess. Whether or not he makes it to the white dog and the red car with five seats, we have the feeling when we leave him that he is going to find some kind of a purposeful way through the world. (  ) thorold | Aug 13, 2019 | > Par Marine de Tilly (Le Point.fr) : "Demain j'aurai vingt ans" d'Alain Mabanckou Joop-le-philosophe | Dec 13, 2018 | This review is from: Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty (Kindle Edition) Enjoyable first-person narrative, by a young Congolese lad on the verge of starting secondary school. It's the 1970s, and as Michel observes his uncle spouting Marxist ideology, he sees to the hypocrisy of a man determined to hang on to his wealth. The current affairs items that probably went largely unnoticed by European kids - Idi Amin, Bokassa etc - feature significantly in the mind of one living 'just over the border'. But most of Michel's life is concerned with his own life - father with two wives (though when he goes to stay ewith the 'other family' he notes "This is my home too, my sisters and brothers never say that Papa Roger's my foster father, they consider me their real brother.") First love (and his rival, the local football star); school; and family arguments as his mother yearns for another child and decides to visit a fetisher...I really liked it. ( ) starbox | Oct 31, 2014 |
 Alain Mabanckou, a novelist of exuberant originality, started a literary festival in Congo-Brazzaville this year. It opened in a stately house overlooking the Congo river, built for Charles de Gaulle's exile from Nazi-occupied Paris, when equatorial Africa was the heart of free France. As Michel, the 10-year-old narrator of Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty, grasps this history: "General de Gaulle came to Brazzaville to announce that France was no longer in France, that the capital of France was no longer Paris, with the Eiffel Tower – Brazzaville was now the capital of free France. So the French all became Congolese like us." Such refreshing logic pervades this delightful comic novel in which the boy narrator's ingenuousness is teamed with a sly authorial wit. Mabanckou writes what resembles memoir while taking the liberties of fiction: in many respects, this is his own 1970s childhood in what was then the People's Republic of Congo. Bigger, ex-Belgian Congo across the river was still Mobutu's Zaire (though as Michel thinks, "the smaller a country, the bigger its problems"). This sparkling portrayal of an urban, postcolonial childhood encompasses Chinese doctors, Indian movies, Senegalese shopkeepers and the French who "go on looking after our oil for us". Yet this open world jostles with one the novel gently mocks. When a fetishist decides that Michel holds the key to his mother's womb, and her failure to have a second child, the innocent boy joins forces with a vagabond-philosopher to search the bins for the lost key. The Nobel laureate JMG Le Clézio, in an afterword to this translation, brackets Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty with The Catcher in the Rye. Its seductive charm and intelligence recentre the world, so that all readers can indeed become Congolese. Readers of Alain Mabanckou’s previous novels, from Broken Glass to Memoirs of a Porcupine, know how his unmistakable style is made of drollery and sarcasm. In Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty, his latest novel to be published in English, the Franco-Congolese adds tenderness to his signature ironic tone. Through Michel, his young alter ego, Mabanckou mischievously recalls his childhood in the port-city of Pointe-Noire, on the Atlantic coast of Congo-Brazzaville. Michel is caught in a whirl of minor events he describes with touching candor: the hiccups in his love relationship with Caroline, the witch tricks of Ousmane the Senegalese shopkeeper, the unfairness of the teacher’s ranking system… But Michel is also concerned with the stories he hears through his father’s radio, from the exile of Iran’s Shah to the craze of Uganda’s Idi Amin. Domestic and historic events intermingle hilariously in Tomorrow I’ll be Twenty, offering a moving depiction of how it was like to grow up in Africa in the late seventies. Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty is full of minor scenes that, put together, form a touching image of a young boy’s psyche. Watching the planes gliding in the sky guessing where they will land, secretly exploring his father’s library or gravely listening to important events of world news unfolding on the radio, Mabanckou follows Michel in his daily life and pulls his reader into the child’s disarming logic. By doing so, he paints a captivating portrait of Congolese society and shows Africa at its most genuine. Onderdeel van de uitgeversreeks(en)Gallimard, Folio (5378) Prijzen
Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2015Michel is ten years old, living in Pointe Noire, Congo, in the 1970s. His mother sells peanuts at the market, his father works at the Victory Palace Hotel, and brings home books left behind by the white guests. Planes cross the sky overhead, and Michel and his friend Lounes dream about the countries where they'll land.While news comes over the radio of the American hostage crisis in Tehran, the death of the Shah, the scandal of the Boukassa diamonds, Michel struggles with the demands of his twelve year old girlfriend Caroline, who threatens to leave him for a bully in the football team.But most worrying for Michel, the witch doctor has told his mother that he has hidden the key to her womb, and must return it before she can have another child. Somehow he must find it. Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty is a humorous and poignant account of an African childhood, drawn from Alain Mabanckou's life. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)843.914Literature French French fiction Modern Period 20th Century 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (3.97)
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