Book Review: ‘The Most Secret Memory of Men,’ by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. Translated by Lara Vergnaud.

In 1968, the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s most prestigious literary prizes, was awarded to a 28-year-old Malian writer named Yambo Ouologuem for his highly acclaimed novel, “Le Devoir de Violence” (published in English as “Bound to Violence” in 1971). Four years later, he was accused of having lifted passages from books by Graham Greene and the French novelist André Schwarz-Bart. The incident forced Ouologuem not only from the spotlight, but from the literary world tout court. He never published again after the scandal, and “Le Devoir de Violence” would not be reprinted in France until 2018, one year after his death in Mali.

Readers of Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s “The Most Secret Memory of Men” — winner of the 2021 Prix Goncourt (the most prestigious literary prize in France) and now published in Lara Vergnaud’s English translation — might recognize the tragic fate of Ouologuem and his stunted literary career in the novel’s central enigma: a Senegalese writer by the name of T.C. Elimane. (For those of us a bit slow on the uptake, Sarr has dedicated his novel to Ouologuem.)

The fictional Elimane is the author of “The Labyrinth of Inhumanity,” published in 1938 and lauded as an instant classic that catapulted its author into the pantheon of Francophone African writers. If not for the racist and colonial sensibility into which it was received in Paris, he might even have entered the French literary pantheon. But shortly after his explosive debut, Elimane was rocked by a plagiarism scandal that stayed his pen seemingly for the rest of his life and forced him into obscurity.

Little else is known about him, as we discover at the outset of the novel. His exact fate is so mysterious, in fact, that the Senegalese novelist Diégane Latyr Faye — a “rising star,” a “Francophone African writer full of promise” and the narrator for most of “The Most Secret Memory of Men” — is hard pressed to find any information about Elimane after his literary exile in the late 1930s. While attending military school in Senegal, Faye first encountered Elimane as a forgotten name sandwiched “between Tchichellé Tchivéla and Tchicaya U Tam’si” in his “Guide to Negro Literature.” As much as he wanted to read the reclusive writer’s supposed masterpiece, it was no longer in print or circulation.

But a copy of “The Labyrinth of Inhumanity” eventually finds its way to Faye — an event that upends his life — after he moves to Paris. He spends several delirious hours, rendered by Sarr with a surrealistic flourish, inhaling the novel, then re-inhaling it (“The experience was just as shattering, and I remained in my room, destroyed, unable to move”) before sharing it with the coterie of young, gifted African writers and critics to which he belongs.

“The Most Secret Memory of Men” is, at bottom, the record of Faye’s search for Elimane. Hardly a trace remains of his life and activities. Is he still alive? If so, where does he live? Has he continued to write, if not to publish? Is T.C. Elimane even his real name? The narrative is animated by an idea expressed in the epigraph, taken from the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. As generations of readers and critics come and go, “the Work continues its journey toward Solitude,” attracting and shedding new critics and new readers like so many layers of skin, until “one day the Work dies,” just as “the most secret memory of men will be extinguished.”

Faye’s quest leads him through a landscape peopled by fictional members of the French literary establishment past and present. Most prominently, there’s Siga D., “a Senegalese writer in her 60s whose every book had caused such scandal that, for some, she’d come to be viewed as an evil Pythia, a ghoul or an outright succubus”; she gives Faye a copy of Elimane’s novel after a humiliating erotic encounter. Others include Musimbwa, a talented Congolese novelist and poet and Faye’s closest friend; Stanislas, Faye’s roommate and a Polish translator; Charles Ellenstein and Thérèse Jacob, the editors credited with first publishing “The Labyrinth of Inhumanity”; and Brigitte Bollème, a journalist whose own pursuit of Elimane decades before Faye’s serves as a trail of bread crumbs.

What might otherwise be dressed up as a simple (if alluring) detective narrative becomes, in Sarr’s hands, a wildly expansive interrogation of everything from the nature of erotic love to the literary canon. We traverse the gamut of genres — the mystery, the ghost story, the philosophical novel, the historical novel, the magical realist tale — as Sarr navigates a spider’s web that enmeshes fact and fiction, biography and gossip, authenticity and plagiarism, fame and infamy.

This virtuosic pastiche is not without a sense of irony; Sarr indicts himself when Faye, in a fit of rage at the literary establishment that can accommodate him only as an “African writer” from the “African Ghetto” with “no literary renown in the outside world,” repudiates those writers “too craven to dare to break tradition via the novel, via poetry, via anything at all.”

The stylistic acrobatics of “The Most Secret Memory of Men” serve to catechize “the occasionally comfortable, often humiliating, ambiguities of our status as African writers (or writers of African origin) in the French literary milieu.” That is, the novel bucks the clichés, expectations and pigeonholes that generations of French readers have used to stymie African novels and novelists. But neither does it lay claim to a universality (“an illusion maintained by people who brandish it like a medal,” per Stanislas) that would wash out what is so particular to the many traditions lumped under the label “African writing” in the West.

As Faye approaches the end of his vertiginous search for Elimane, Sarr has the reader wonder whether any work of art can really be worth the mystery its enigmatic story might evoke. If all great art is rare, the book’s very premise suggests, it must surely be worth hunting for. “It might be that every writer, in the end, only contains a single essential book, a work that demands to be written, between two voids,” Faye admits. Whether or not Sarr has another great book waiting for us on the other side of the void, “The Most Secret Memory of Men” is incontestably one that demanded to be written.

Ben Libman is the author of “The Third Solitude,” forthcoming in 2025.

Source Link