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the complete review - fiction

The Villain's Dance

by
Fiston Mwanza Mujila

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : enjoyably rambunctious ensemble-piece

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Comme il l’avait fait avec Tram 83, Mwanza Mujila met la fièvre dans une grande ville du pays. À ceci près : l’histoire a des ressorts plus politiques, plus dramatiques, plus ancrés dans le réel. Pour cette fiction de grande envergure, il joue d’une langue vivifiante, où s’affirme la beauté des « voyages clandestins » et des « transhumances déambulatoires » qu’offre la littérature." - Hubert Artus, Le Monde diplomatique
  
  
• "The plots and vendettas zig and zag, eventually intersecting. Throughout, the voices of the children strike some of the book’s most compelling notes. (...) Mujila’s frenetic energy is captured in rapturous language by Roland Glasser, translating from the French. Recalling the gritty, exuberant novels of the South African Zakes Mda (Ways of Dying) and the Congolese Alain Mabanckou (African Psycho), Mujila has brought to life a feverish tale of Africa’s underclass, whose demands -- like the author’s -- are hard to resist." - Anderson Tepper, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Mujila springt zwischen den Perspektiven, erzählt mal in Ich-Form, mal wie ein jovialer allwissender Märchenonkel. Dass diese Brüche nicht stören, liegt an der Agilität und dem Charme seiner Sprache. (...) Wenn Mujila verhandelt, was Literatur im Chaos vermag, dann webt er in seine Aliasse jede Menge biografische Fußnoten. Und spricht en passant über die großen Themen des postkolonialen Afrika: vom Raubbau an den Bodenschätzen über die innerafrikanische Migration bis zur Allgegenwart der Korruption." - Jonathan Fischer, Süddeutsche Zeitung

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Villain's Dance is set in Fiston Mwanza Mujila's native Democratic Republic of Congo -- whereby, as he writes in an Author's Note, here: "Zaire is the name most befitting the atmosphere and the life stories of the characters in this text", with the story set during the waning years of Mobutu Sese Seko's (mis)rule. Mobuto's fall, and the coming of a new regime, do feature, but the larger political situation is mostly only background; so too, most of the action is far from the capital, taking place in Lubumbashi -- the capital of once-secessionist Katanga -- as well as across the border, in Angola.
       In fifty-four chapters -- presented with often long summarizing chapter-headings --, the novel shifts between several characters and their lives, with some overlap and then connection, the narratives also shifting between first and third person.
       Among the significant figures are the larger-than-life Tshiamuena -- "'I am the doyenne of humanity !' she screamed beneath the tropical sun of the quarry mines", a timeless figure who claims: "that she was born in 1885, 1882, 1876, and even -- when she'd got out of bed on the wrong side -- 1492" (and, also, that she was born in Japan, in the 1930s, as Fumie Ogawa), who eventually goes to seek her fortune in Angola, among the diamond-miners. There are also street kids Ngungi and Sanza, whose base is around the city Post Office, hustling for money in various ways and happy enough with their street life -- even if occasionally lifted out or away from it. There's Monsieur Guillaume -- a poetry lover, especially of (Srečko) Kosovel ("At your age, he'd already created a whole world" Monsieur Guillaume tells young Sanza) -- who works for the governmental DDD intelligence service and has a wide net of informers he relies on. And there is Austrian Franz Baumgartner, who became obsessed with Zaire and moved there, even taking on Zairean citizenship; Tshiamuena tries to get him to write her memoirs (he's unenthusiastic, despite the rich material: "with al due respect, I couldn't give a shit about your phantasmagoric tales") and he works on a novel.
       Much of local life revolves around music and nightlife -- and the 'Villain's Dance' of the title is the ultimate frenzy to lose oneself in: one dance-scene involving it it is described as: "A rapture verging on madness". And:

     There were two versions of the Villain's Dance. The longer one lasted an hour and thirty-seven minutes; the shorter one, eighteen minutes -- sometimes ten when the DJ was blasted on glue.

- M.A.Orthofer, 6 April 2024

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Links:

• Deep Vellum publicity page
• Métailié publicity page
• Pontas Agency information page
• Zsolnay publicity page
• Unionsverlag publicity page
• nottetempo publicity page

• Chroniques littéraires africaines (French)
• Deutschlandfunk (German)
• Encres Vagabondes (French)
• froggy's delight (French)
• Magma Magazine (Italian)
• Le Monde diplomatique (French)
• nachtkritik.de (German)
• Les notes de Grâce M. (French)
• Scritti d'Africa (Italian)
• Der Standard (German)
• Süddeutsche Zeitung (German)

• Official site

• Tram 83

• See Index of books from and about Africa
• See Index of French literature
• Other books from Deep Vellum

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About the Author:

       DRC Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila was born in 1981.

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© 2024 the complete review

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