How to begin to convey the feeling of this novel? Magical realism is an expression which has lost much of the precision it conveyed when it was first used to describe a style of expressing the bizarre and historically disjointed reality of Latin America through fiction, but we might still wish to apply it to this work. Surrealism is another genre suggested by this book. But in the context of African writing in French, Tansi’s work stands apart. While both expressions give us some indication as to what we might expect, Tansi, in his mature work, give us a glimpse of a hallucinatory world where the forces of time and history conspire to generate the denial of life. Perhaps this comes as no surprise given the colonial and postcolonial histories of Tansi’s homeland Zaire, but this is no systematic account of atrocity. Instead the foolishness and follies of the newly independent state form the background to an account of a town which still prides its values and honour, but in the face of the arbitrary rule even this dignity collapses into a series of mysterious murders. Time is measured by the number of occasions which the country’s capital is moved by the powers that be and the failure of the police to arrive to investigate the local deaths. The novel is populated by bizarre and outrageous characters who, as in the best novels of Garcia Marquez, obey laws which are entirely of their own devising. This is a vibrant account of chaos.

‘One morning, unprecedented crowds gathered in the Plaza de la Poudra, not to await the arrival of the police, nor to bury Estina Benta’s bones, nor even to watch the departure of Sarnata Nola’s troupe. The multitudes jostled for position to see the fish with the death’s head that the fishermen, Fernando Lambert and Luizo Martinèz Lopèz, had just caught. It was a winged monster at least seventy feet long and weighing some three tons. On its hide, covered with scales, feathers and hair, gleamed the seven colours of the rainbow. From its eyes came a sonorous beam that reminded us of the fires of the of the great Nsanga-Norda cemetery. We couldn’t make up our minds whether this really was a fish, or a snake. By eleven o’clock, people had come from Valtano and even Nsanga-Norda to look at the fish with the death’s head. Fernando Lambert had baptised it thus because the creature’s entire face was covered with kinds of black lenses and, on the top of its forehead, there were what looked like crossed tibias, which emitted a beautiful ray of light.’ p62