Novel
Les Chauves-souris
Not translated into English
Bernard Nanga · 1980
Synopsis
In Eborzel, a small town in an African country in the aftermath of independence, Robert Bilanga, director of economic affairs, loves money, parties and women. He keeps mistresses, some of whom, linked to powerful politicians, are meant to open doors for him; Arlette, a young schoolteacher who has yielded to his advances, is crushed by it. His wife, Clotilde, submits, his son Roger judges him, and in the village of Vémelé no one believes the speeches any more. A fraud that has been uncovered is settled by envelopes that make their way down the hierarchy.
Context
This first novel came out in Paris from Présence africaine in 1980, in the Écrits series, in two hundred and three pages. Censored in Cameroon on publication, it was put on sale there freely only a few years later; Présence africaine reissued it in 1995. Town and village are invented and placed somewhere on the continent. The novel attacks corruption and overconsumption, and Djibril Diallo places it, in 2020, among the novels that took as their target, through the grotesque and irony, the dictatorships of French-speaking black Africa.
Who it is for
In French, about two hundred pages. It is better to know that the town and the village are fictional, and that the novel targets the elites of the first years of independence.
Prizes and reception
No prize found with certainty for this novel. His second novel, published in Dakar in 1984, received a posthumous prize in 1985.
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