Ties that bind

I dreamed of Africa

The Lights of Pointe-Noire. By Alain Mabanckou. Translated by Helen Stevenson. Serpent’s Tail; 280 pages; £8.99. To be published in America by New Press in March 2016.

THE world knows little about the Republic of Congo, and this travelogue-cum-memoir barely changes that. The author’s real achievement is to capture a universal experience, one ever more common in the age of mass migration: what it means to come home after a long absence.

Now living in America and France, Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese novelist who teaches creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, and who was recently shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker International prize, visits his home town on Africa’s equatorial Atlantic coast for the first time in 23 years. The resulting encounters, and his accompanying thoughts, are familiar to many passing through international airports today, if rarely expressed so silkily.

Here are the remembered aspirations of parents who bless their children’s departure yet regret it nonetheless, and the migrant’s sense of guilt for having...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1GmG3eG