Interestingly, some reviewers seem to have understood this as a book about the tension between tradition and modernity. But I found it to be well-told and engaging. It isn’t strictly plot-driven and there are stories within the story, like the village legend dealing with children’s duties to their parents.
And then he moves on to his young life in the village and for a few years with his adult cousin in town.
Then he talks about his mother, a woman with a strong personality who has the misfortune of losing her husband and daughters and being accused of sorcery by her husband’s village, but refuses to give up. He first builds a picture of his childhood world, recalling how the community traditionally solved problems like wives leaving their husbands (this involves large meetings between both villages, since a marriage between two people is the marriage of their families). This short book is perhaps reminiscent of someone telling stories around a fire in way the narrator moves from one subject to the next. But it soon hits its stride, and once I realized that the style of storytelling, with a certain amount of repetition, was drawing on oral tradition, it became much more palatable.
It’s told from the perspective of a boy who grew up in a traditional village society in Gabon, and the beginning didn’t seem to bode well due to some repetition and meandering.
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