Towards the beginning of his novel, Kossi Efoui tells a joke: “It’s the story of three men together in the prison cell. The first says, ‘I got twenty years for telling a joke.’ The second says, ‘I got fifteen for laughing.’ The third says, ‘I got ten years for doing nothing.’ ‘You’re lying,’ say the other two, ‘doing nothing–that’s only a five-year stretch.'” In an unnamed African country — Efoui was born and raised in Togo — the narrator of The Shadow of Things to Come (translated from French by Chris Turner), a boy’s father is taken away to a re-education camp from reasons unknown, and his mother is whisked away to a mental hospital. Mama Maize — a woman who cares for lost children — provides shelter and Axis Kemal — a bookseller — provide guidance to our narrator, until he receives the call to the “Frontier Challenge,” likely a border war. But we’re never certain, for Efoui’s narrative is filled with more doublespeak than George Orwell’s 1984. Efoui mimics the way that the government maintains uncertainty with euphemisms upon euphemisms. Nothing is clear until the government comes banging on your door, that is. “Don’t wait for them to capture you.” The Shadow of Things to Come is ominous, circular, and effective.Here is what a couple of others had to say about the book:
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Matt Hartman, Bookslut: “This novel is a powerful reflection on the world we live in, a vision that goes beyond truisms about tyranny and control and freedom and returns our gaze to the humans at the center of it all.”
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Gautam Bhatia, The Wire: “The bleak, almost nightmarish world conjured up in The Shadow of Things to Come, where everything but words have “so little existence”, is a disturbingly familiar one.”
You can read an excerpt here. This is book #36 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.
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