Bound to Violence (Ouologuem, trans. by Manheim)

I can’t say I’ve read any other authors from Mali, so I thought I’d take a chance. As soon as I understood it was satire (okay, I read Cherif Keita’s introduction), I was concerned. To understand satire, one has to understand what is being satirized and my knowledge of Mali is nil, and my understanding of African history (with the useful exception of colonialism) is pretty minimal. In other words, I am comfortable saying that this might be a great book, but with a few exceptions, I just didn’t get it.