Porcupines and Phantom Killers

The winner of one of France’s most coveted literary prizes, the Prix Renaudot, is Alain Mabanckou, whose Mémoires de porc-épic (Memoirs of a Porcupine) “[beat] out the most-hyped European novel of 2006, Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes,” crows Soft Skull Press, Mabanckou’s U.S. publisher.

Mabanckou’s first book to be published in the States will be African Psycho, expected from Soft Skull next February. Soft Skull describes the plot this way:

African Psycho concerns a would-be serial killer, Gregoire Nakobomayo, and the spiritual relationship he has developed with his phantom mentor, a far more accomplished serial killer, Angoualima.

The title recalls Bret Easton Ellis’ infamous book, but while Ellis’ narrator was blank, and the book eschewed any kind of psychological exposition, accepting pure psychosis as the bottomline, Mabanckou’s protagonist is all psychology and relentless internal chatter and prevarication. The act of deciding to kill, immediately exposed in the novel’s first line, “I have decided to kill Germaine on December 29,” puts the psychological front and center. Whatever one may say about it, killing someone requires both psychological and logistical preparedness. This aspect is iterated within the first few paragraphs, when Gregoire introduces his deceased idol, Angoualima, the phantom to whom he continually speaks about his criminal intentions. Little by little, Gregoire interweaves Angoualima’s life and criminal exploits with his own. Despite his string of previously botched criminal attempts, Gregoire’s final decision and failure to kill Germaine, his live-in girlfriend and a professional prostitute, leads to an abrupt unraveling.

Mabanckou was born in the French Congo but currently lives in Los Angeles and teaches literature at UCLA. He is one of “Francophone Africa’s most prolific contemporary writers,” and the author of half a dozen volumes of poetry and six novels. He will be a Fellow in the Humanities Council at Princeton University next year.

Sounds like someone to keep in your sights.

An excerpt from African Psycho can be found here.