“Three books that marked me”… by Emmanuel Dongala
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Every Sunday in the summer, The World Africa asks an author from the African continent to talk about works that have marked him. This week, the question is put to the Congolese writer Emmanuel Dongala. A leading figure in French-speaking literature, he is a novelist, short story writer and playwright.
life and a halfby Sony Labou Tansi
For his delirium. By delirium, I mean everything: an unbridled imagination, a fast style where words overlap and jostle like bursts of machine gun fire, multiple lexical inventions, all carried by tragicomic humor and jubilant insolence. . And yet, despite this “above ground” plot of the novel, or rather thanks to it, the Congolese Sony manages the tour de force of showing us and making us grasp the brutal reality of these authoritarian regimes which have spread across post- independences.
When it was released in 1979, this book had been described as“literary UFO”. Couldn’t say it better. life and a half is a solar book in which the beginnings of what is now called the“afrofuturism”. For me, it is one of the three books that marked breaks in French-speaking African literature after independence, the other two being The duty of violence, of Yambo Ouologuem, and The Suns of Independence, by Ahmadou Kourouma. Ouologuem was the first to shatter the myth of a paradisiacal pre-colonial Africa. Kourouma for his part was the first to describe the excesses of new independent states. life and a half is simply a masterpiece.
A hundred years of lonelinessby Gabriel Garcia Marquez
For his first sentence. I love the first sentences of novels. The incipit is really what opens the door to us and allows us to anticipate the journey promised to us by the author. That’s how I felt when I read the beginning of A hundred years of loneliness : I was dazzled. You have to hear this first sentence unfold! “Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to experience the ice. »
The sentence is ample and breathes but, above all, a real tour de force, it places the protagonist from the start in the future, the present and the past, three simultaneous temporalities. I learned this first sentence by heart and, please, in Spanish, the original language of the work. Everything seems wonderful to me in this novel by the Colombian writer, the writing, the story, the magic of the places and the characters. This is a book that left an indelible mark on me.
A brief history of timeby Stephen Hawking
Because he made me think I’m smart. A brief history of time is not a novel, but nevertheless one of my favorite books. The Big-Bang, space-time, the expansion of the universe, black holes… it brings together all the theories of modern cosmology, explained in a simple and clear way, without any mathematical equation and embellished with humor by the British physicist. This essay, which no doubt speaks to the scientist that I am, reads like a novel. It thrilled me when I read it about fifteen years ago. Since then, any doubts I might have had about my intelligence have been lifted, because I discovered that I was able to understand Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg and all those geniuses who revolutionized physics in the 20th century.e century.
I came back to this book on July 12, when NASA published the first images of the deep universe taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, this super device stationed a million kilometers from Earth. Thanks to what this Stephen Hawking taught me, I was able to follow and understand without any difficulty the comments and explanations provided by the scientists in charge of the project. When, among the billions of galaxies present on one of the images, one of the specialists showed one whose light was emitted thirteen billion years ago, that is to say a few million Barely years after the “creation” of our universe, a shiver ran through my body. An almost mystical thrill, as if my whole being radiated with this fossil light from the fire of our origins. For a writer, what more could you ask for from a cosmology essay which, after having taught you about quantum vacuum and space-time, pushes you to metaphysical questions about our place in the universe?
Emmanuel Dongala’s last two novels, Group photo by the river and The Bridgewater Sonata have been published by Actes Sud.
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