Description
International Booker-nominated satirist GauZ’ returns with a panoramic journey into the colonization of the African interior.
In an attempt to avoid life as a factory worker, Dabilly, a young white man in late nineteenth-century France, seeks colonial adventure in Africa. Still mourning the recent deaths of his parents, he joins a beleaguered French general trying to set up trading routes on the Ivory coast which, in 1880, is still untouched by colonization.
A century later, a young Black boy born to communist parents in Amsterdam starts learning about his heritage. When he arrives in Cote d’Ivoire to visit his grandmother and uncover more about his ancestry, he discovers surprising traces of an ancestor he never knew existed.
Superimposing these two coming-of-age stories, GauZ’ plunges the reader into the lives of two very different people and reveals the long arc of African colonization. In exuberant and ornate prose, translated by award-winning Frank Wynne, Comrade Papa is a remarkable, enlightening postcolonial consideration of the soul, and what it means to search for fulfillment.
Praise for Comrade Papa
“A funny, ebullient, often chaotic tale of French colonial exploitation of Ivory Coast . . . author GauZ’ was shortlisted for the International Booker prize for his [first] novel Standing Heavy. Comrade Papa is even better.”
—John Self, The Guardian
“GauZ’ breaks down the language of colonization . . . with marvelous linguistic invention. This book made me laugh and smile.”
—Gladys Marivat, Le Monde (Paris)
“The point of view transcends racial essentialisms to instead tell the story of people . . . An expansive novel that is political without being self-righteous.”
—Laurence Houot, France Télévision
“A novel about the clash between cultures and languages . . . GauZ’s prose is intoxicating.”
—Sean J. Rose, Livres Hebdo
“Audacious and inventive.”
—Baptiste Liger, Lire
Praise for Standing Heavy
“This book is about the anti-flâneurs: not the rich white men who roam the boulevards of Paris but poorly paid Black men whose jobs require them to stand still. As a security guard, the protagonist of Standing Heavy is invisible but sees everything. Told in a fragmentary style—as if from different camera angles—this is the story of colonialism and consumerism, of the specifics of power, and of the hope of the sixties diminishing as society turns cynical and corrupt.”
—International Booker Prize Judges’ citation
“This shrewd, episodic novel stars the security guards of Paris . . . undocumented Ivoirian immigrants whose watchful eyes examine Parisian turmoil over two generations.”
—New York Times
“A spry volume of 167 pages . . . that manages to trade heavily in politics while also sneaking up on your sympathy. I won’t spoil the end, but it startled me in its poignancy.”
—The Walrus
“A cunning observer and a disenchanted protestor, GauZ’ makes shopping an ethnological mine, a priceless sketch and a combat sport.”
—Elle
“This compact, humane satire, deftly translated by Frank Wynne, entertains as much as it informs.”
—Lucy Popescu, Financial Times