…in Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou, who totally would’ve made the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list of authors if he weren’t born in 1966, about a new bar called “Credit Gone West” that really pisses off the citizens of a town called Trois-Cents.
The bar is translated as “Credit Gone Away” in this excerpt from an anthology, but I couldn’t find the whole novel—where the bar is called “Credit Gone West”—on Google Books.
Check out pages 106 and 107:
And especially this part:
… there was direct action from a group of thugs who were paid by some old assholes from the district, nostalgic for the days of the Case de Gaulle, for the life of a houseboy, the life of the faithful negro with his service medal, for the days of the Colonial Exhibition and the negro balls, with Josephine Baker leaping about in a skirt made out of bananas, and these paragons of respectability set snares without end for the boss, with their thugs in hoods who came at the dead of night, at the darkest hour, armed with iron bars from Zanzibar, with clubs and cudgels from medieval Christendom, poisoned spears from the time of Chaka Zulu, sickles and hammers from the Communist block, catapults from the Hundred Years’ War, Gallic billhooks, pygmy hoes, Molotov cocktails from May ’68, machetes left over from a killing spree in Rwanda, slings from the famous fight between David and Goliath, with all this heavy arsenal they came, but again, in vain, though they managed to destroy one part of the bar, and its was the talk of the town, and all over the papers…
I’m a sucker for a writer who can tame time like it’s a pressed ham—condense it, slice it, and show us a cross-section.
And if you’d like to hear a news report in Lingala (referenced on page 107) that involves men cutting up meat with machetes (perhaps the same model used to attack Credit Gone West) please enjoy:
UPDATE IN THE BRIGHT LIGHT OF MORNING Forgive me for the pressed ham remark. It seemed to make sense at 3:30 this morning.
Can you tame a pressed ham?
Perhaps you’re a sucker for a writer who is unable to tame the English language, and so constructs endless run on sentences. Perhaps.
When I tried to tame a pressed ham, they adjusted my dosage.
Sorry, but the American need to make writing “appealing to an 8th grader” (no thanks, Vonnegut) leaves out many of my favorite authors: Celine, Robbe-Grillet, etc. (Currently: Check out Eileen Myles’ “The Importance of Being Iceland” for some wonderful long sentences that are sinewy with thought and flow.) Thanks, Brandon.
Whoops, Brendan. All apologies.
@2 is right. That’s run-on gibberish. The writer needs to investigate some other punctuation marks besides commas. The real long-sentence masters, Henry James, f’rinstance, would be appalled. Not that it made him an interesting writer but he knew what a semi-colon was for. Even Louis-Ferdinand Celine knew to use ellipses instead.
Oh, and “pressed ham” has one and only one meaning in the Stranger universe.
#2 and #7. It’s not a single sentence; it’s just punctuated all wrong.
#2 and #6. fixed.
I’ll take ellipses over commas, too, Fnarf, though I was thinking more about the ranty sections of “Journey to the End of the Night” than the full-on “Death on the Installment Plan” Celine.