ALAIN MABANCKOU'S PAGE: DEALING WITH THE DEAD: A Novel, return to Pointe-Noire in fantasyland

DEALING WITH THE DEAD: A Novel
ALAIN MABANCKOU (tr. Helen Stevenson)
The New Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.99 all editions, preorder now for delivery 16 September 2025

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From one of Africa’s greatest living writers, a ghostly reckoning with Congolese history

One day in the Congolese town of Pointe-Noire, Liwa Ekimakingaï wakes to find himself in a cemetery where, three days earlier, he had been buried at the age of twenty-two in a pair of flared purple trousers in which he is now trapped forever. All around him are the other residents of the cemetery, all of whom have their own complex stories of life and death to share.

Bewildered by his predicament and unwilling to relinquish his tender bond with his devoted grandmother, Liwa makes his way back home to see her one last time, against all spectral advice. As he does, disturbing rumors swirl together with Liwa’s jumbled memories of his last night on earth, leading him to try and solve the mystery of his own untimely demise.

Sure to appeal to readers of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Dealing with the Dead is an exuberant, phantasmagorical tale of ambition, community, and forces beyond human control and a scathing satire on corruption and political violence by one of the most-recognized chroniclers of modern Central Africa.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: As Pointe-Noire enters my awareness more and more, I realize why Author Mabanckou focuses his storytelling in this fictionalized hometown. He works inside a head that, like all of us, was intensely of a very specific time and place, now gone; he uses it with delicacy to cast its shadows broadly; and he knows it so well to know how it maps onto the world.

Liwa's journey in a fantasy afterlife is aptly compared to Lincoln in the Bardo above. It resembles that story in that it assumes an afterlife, or a between phase between death and nothingness more precisely, in which a soul may wander to seek answers. I myownself found, for one of the few times ever, the use of second-person narration for Liwa's PoV to be very effective. It truly works because it points up the here-but-not-here nature of a dead narrator. However much I doubt this space exists on some immaterial plane, that is not how it is used in this story. Liwa's self is not dead yet, and is surrounded by other not-dead-yet folk (whose narratives are all presented in third person, blessèdly sidestepping that twee trap) who populate his spectral graveyard. He needs to finish something before he can pass into whatever comes next. The other dead folk discourage him, but he does it anyway.

They are right, of course, because he can't prevent his grandmother from feeling her feelings and, as he begins to process his jumbled, violent last memories to solve for himself why he is dead at only twenty-four, the answers are deeply, well, upsetting and traumatizing...as I expect anyone dead at twenty-four would find them, no matter what the reasons were.

It is in the use of a fantasy world, one magical and tailored to Liwa's exact needs, that the story works its universalizing magic. As Liwa moves through his graveyard peers, he listens to their various tales and discovers his own. "Once you've been laid in the earth, time will start to do its work, and for all their good intentions, the people who knew you will gradually forget, till one dry season comes when not a soul ventures forth to your tomb." The truncated youth is only going to fade from others' lives. It is best to let go sooner rather than later; learning too much about your death won't make Death better.

I was very taken with the way this fantasy world was populated by persons previously alive as well as personifications of cultural great ones, like Black Mamba, the big boss of the dead. I totally got Liwa's inability to let go of the need to know what happened to himself, and his disgusted outrage at the facts around his death. It is Author Mabanckou's writing career to bring to light the consequences of blind superstition, greed, and amoral indifference to others' suffering. In this vivid, intense narrative of those consequences for one young purple-trousered ghost/entity, he shakes a well-informed finger in our readerly faces.

Of my three Mabanckou reads, this one is the standout, and the one I'd encourage you all to read.