Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila

Book Review by Galen O'Hanlon | 09 May 2016
Book title: Tram 83
Author: Fiston Mwanza Mujila

You can forget about the empty savannah, the deep jungle and the native peoples mystically in touch with nature and a purer, simpler past. This is a book about Africa – about Congo – and it’s full of people sweating and mining and drinking and fucking and fighting and dodgy dealing and dreaming and getting by, just. They’re all packed into the one bar in the City State, Tram 83. So you’ve got the miners, the students, the for-profit tourists, the baby-chicks and the jazz musicians. And in the middle of it all is Lucien, the writer trying to get a play published.

It was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, and you can see why. Even in translation from the French, the voice is captivating, abrupt, expansive. It’s a down-and-out in DRC, and it moves with all the energy of a sweaty night out: it goes everywhere and nowhere, and it keeps washing up in the same place. It’s bewildering. Nothing is explained, there’s no grand narrative, yet everything’s here.

The style is uncontainable. There are finely-wrought set pieces, then pages of truncated dialogue. Then there are bits that read like a play, and there are many stories within stories. There are repeated phrases and rules and refrains – a whole cacophony of life. It’s gripping, immersive, real. 

Out now, published by Jacaranda Books, RRP £8.99