Dealing with the Dead

A Novel

Alain Mabanckou

Translated by Helen Stevenson

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

“Alain Mabanckou addresses the reader with exuberant inventiveness in novels that are brilliantly imaginative in their forms of storytelling. His voice is vividly colloquial, mischievous and often outrageous as he explores, from multiple angles, the country where he grew up, drawing on its political conflicts and compromises, disappointments and hopes. He acts the jester, but with serious intent and lacerating effect.”
—Man Booker International Prize judges’ citation

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.

Praise

“A sharp and entertaining addition to Alain Mabanckou’s broader portrayal of Pointe–Noire’s historical complexities.”

—Times Literary Supplement

“We should all be reading Alain Mabanckou right now. His brilliantly imaginative novels throw a rope across borders and between people. A glorious, funny, surreal novel, set in communist Congo–Brazzaville in the 1970s.”

—Alex Preston, Financial Times

“Mabanckou’s satire is as biting as writers from Armando Iannucci to Paul Beatty. Dealing with the Dead is a rewarding, humorously dark read.”

—Buzz magazine

“This is writing that literally and figuratively reshapes you, revealing spatial and emotional dimensions that are both all too foreign and all too familiar. Mabanckou infuses his novel with the macabre to move, unnerve, and unexpectedly delight.”

—The Skinny (5-star review)

“Mabanckou sketches the eccentric cast of local characters, living and dead, with satirical wit and loving detail.”

—Daily Mirror

“Funny, spooky and surreal, this shapeshifting novel is at once serious and comic, spooky and cheerful, grave and bitter, erudite, gossipy, moralising, and excoriating.”

—The Guardian

“Mabanckou interweaves horror and gallows humour to great effect, the shifts in tone are beautifully controlled, and his prose is rendered into exquisite English by Stevenson.”

—The Guardian

“Mabanckou presents us with a sexy, pulsating city while mining deadpan comedy from its superstitions and its corrupt clerical and political elite.”

—Telegraph

“Exuberant . . . Dealing with the Dead is often damning, frequently hilarious and always compassionate. At just 200 pages, Helen Stevenson’s translation from the French performs supple shifts between registers and keeps the story moving at lightning pace. It’s the work of a writer who, in exile, has poured his indignation and longing for home into a novel that transports his readers there and immerses us in its complexities.”

—Financial Times

News and Reviews

The Lights of Pointe-Noire and The New Press Win the French Voices Grand Prize

On February 29, 2016, Alain Mabanckou’s The Lights of Pointe-Noire: A Memoi

Books by Alain Mabanckou

The New Press

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