The Villain's Dance
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature
Full of wit, music, and a rollicking cast of characters, The Villain's Dance shows Fiston Mwanza Mujila is back with a bang.
Zaire. Late 90's. Mobutu's thirty-year reign is tottering. In Lubumbashi, the stubbornly homeless Sanza has fallen in with a trio of veteran street kids led by the devious Ngungi. A chance encounter with the mysterious Monsieur Guillaume seems to offer a way out . . . Meanwhile in Angola, Molakisi has joined thousands of fellow Zairians hoping to make their fortunes hunting diamonds, while Austrian Franz finds himself roped into writing the memoirs of the charismatic Tshiamuena, the "Madonna of the Cafunfo Mines." Things are drawing to a head, but at the Mambo de la Fête, they still dance the Villain's Dance from dusk till dawn.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila takes readers on a wild ride through Central Africa in a surreal, adventurous fusion of comedy, drama, and politics. In the 1990s, Zaire is home to an improbable cast of characters struggling to prevail under a corrupt government. A wildly eccentric woman has proclaimed herself the deity of the local diamond mines. She’s urging an Austrian expatriate to pen her biography, though he prefers drinking and dancing at the local hotspot, Mambo de la Fête. A handful of homeless street kids sniff glue and make trouble while serving as legmen for one Monsieur Guillaume, while others seek their fortunes across the border in Angola. Mujila employs a singular brand of magic realism as his tale swings from one stage to the next, and his rhythmic wordplay mimics dazzling musical rhythms. It’s as strange, funny, scary, and moving as life itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The precarity of late-1990s Zaire (present-day Democratic Republic of Congo) and the scramble amid the country's collapse in the wake of the Rwandan genocide shape the freewheeling and inventive latest from Mujila (Tram 83). In Lubumbashi, adolescent Sanza falls into a glue-huffing street gang and is later recruited by intelligence agent Monsieur Guillame to spy on various citizens at the city's popular rumba bars. A parallel narrative set across the border in Angola follows Tshiamuena, a woman claiming to be centuries old and simultaneously living in Japan, who offers spiritual guidance to Zairians lured by Angola's diamond mines. She conscripts a young Austrian man named Franz Baumgartner to write her memoirs, but he's unable to make sense of her shifting stories and eventually flees to Lubumbashi, where he spends nights at the rumba bars, catching the attention of Guillame. As rebels successfully topple president Mobuto Sese Seko's regime and move toward Lubumbashi, the characters take desperate measures to survive. Mujila's virtuosic narrative shifts, feverish magical realism, and dizzying chronological leaps make for an intoxicating reading experience. This complex tale bears exquisite fruit.
