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the complete review - fiction

Dealing with the Dead

by
Alain Mabanckou

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : lively and appealing

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "The clarity of Mabanckou’s prose means that, while he conveys Liwa’s bewilderment, the reader is rarely confused, even as the novel starts to teem with voices. (...) Liwa may be the novel’s main character but Pointe-Noire is its most vivid presence. (...) The novel could have been longer, Mabanckou’s prose in Stevenson’s translation can sound almost too fluent and melodious for its weighty subject matter, and the denouement, when Liwa discovers how he died, is abrupt. But greater length may have denuded some of the impact of a story that stays with the reader long after its final scene." - Max Liu, Financial Times
  
  
• "Liwa is a classic Mabanckou character: orphaned, irresistibly charming but cruelly bereft of luck. (...) Dealing With the Dead confronts some out-and-out ghoulish realities, to be sure, but like all Mabanckou novels, it is possessed of an exhilarating hunger; it flits and forages between genres and registers, never lingering in any one place for long. Its pleasures, as a result, are manifold: it can be read as a whodunnit, a reimagined picaresque, a tragic bildungsroman, an occult homecoming story, a fable on the corrupting influence of power and a biting satire on Congolese history. It is at once serious and comic, spooky and cheerful, grave and bitter, erudite, gossipy, moralising and excoriating." - Yagnishsing Dawoor, The Guardian
  
  
• "Les figures et les lieux aux noms les plus farfelus se multiplient ainsi à chaque page du livre, de même que surviennent chapitre après chapitre les événements les plus improbables : crimes crapuleux, meurtres rituels, magie noire… Une narration enlevée accompagne cette gradation d’intrigues, passant d’un ton ironique et léger au comique de situation poussé jusqu’à l’outrance." - Kidi Bebey, Le Monde
  
  
• "Mabanckou immerses us in Liwa’s tale, creating the uncanny sense of a corpse communing with his sentient self. The three parts never fully coalesce, but Mabanckou interweaves horror and gallows humour to great effect, the shifts in tone are beautifully controlled, and his prose is rendered into exquisite English by Stevenson." - Lucy Popescu, The Observer
  
  
• "While some of the imagery can be heavy-handed -- the funeral procession's U-turn at the Patrice Lumumba roundabout is a rather obvious metaphor for the neighbouring DRC's descent into dictatorship -- Le commerce des Allongés is a sharp and entertaining addition to Alain Mabanckou's broader portrayal of Pointe-Noire's historical complexities" - Sarah Arens, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "Dealing with the Dead is by far Mabanckou's most magical text, but it still anchors itself with raw and realistic storytelling. (...) Dealing with the Dead may walk on familiar territory for Mabanckou, and to a certain extent, that makes it feel a bit less powerful than his previous work. Even so, it’s hard to deny what makes it unique. Despite not heading in an entirely new direction, the author still carries a passion and mastery of his craft that won’t lose momentum anytime soon." - Daniel Bokemper, World Literature Today

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The central figure in Dealing with the Dead is the just-deceased orphan Liwa Ekimakingaï, but the story is told in the second person -- "You tell yourself over and over till you come to believe it", it begins --, putting the reader in Liwa's position (to the extent possible) throughout. His name means 'Death was afraid of me', but apparently that wasn't quite enough; as to why he's dead at age twenty-four, that remains a mystery for much of the novel, with odds and ends about it dropped along the way -- "What a strange way to die, but he deserved it" -- but the full story only revealed in the novel's resolution.
       The novel is presented in three roughly equal-length parts. In the first, Liwa begins to adjust to his new state -- he (you): "do your best to convince yourself this is your new life, it won't be all bad" --, with a few unusual challenges to deal with (like the fact that everything appears upside down, though fortunately that at least can rather easily be set right again). We learn of his life until his death, his mother having died in childbirth and Liwa then raised by his devoted grandmother, Mâ Lembé. (She had wanted to name him 'Yezu Christo', which might have helped with the whole rising-from-the-dead thing, but the authorities wouldn't permit that.) And there's his elaborate funeral -- a procession that: "will be one of the most impressive seen in the last few years", with: "forty or so buses, not to mention the hundreds who have volunteered to drive people in their cares" -- though it will only go so far, stopping short of the wealthy of Pointe-Noire (and the Europeans) live, who don't want to be disturbed by such things.
       Liwa is laid to rest in the cemetery of Frère-Lachaise -- "what had always been modestly called the 'Cemetery of the Poor', despite also welcoming the rich" --, which contrasts with the more recent ambitious 'Cemetery of the Rich' (with the famous people in Frère-Lachaise dug up when the new cemetery was built and re-interred there, "where the tombs are proper little houses, attracting tourist from all over the world"). Liwa's place is in Frère-Lachaise, and not among the 'well dead' of the Cemetery of the Rich -- and the divide between the rich and powerful and the common people repeatedly comes up in the life- (and death-) stories of those Liwa encounters in death (as well as in what happened to him).
       In learning about his new (non-)life, Liwa meets several of his fellow dead, who tell the stories of their own fates, with superstition and a willingness to do whatever it takes to get success featuring prominently, in one way or another, in most of them -- creative little life-stories that illuminate the culture and (corrupt) politics of Congo-Brazzaville. It's also no coïncidence that Liwa met his death on 15 August -- the national holiday celebrating independence ("Ring a bell, does it, 15 August ? Isn't that why you're here now ?" someone reminds him along the way ...). And in the final section then Liwa retraces his steps, figuring out what led to his death -- another in the by then familiar pattern, the root of which is the powerful clinging on to what they have, regardless of the cost.
       Vivid -- and as such not always entirely easy to take, given that death is so much in the air here -- and with an often very dark edge (though softened considerably by the humor), Dealing with the Dead is richly entertaining, and manages to avoid being bleak or too sentimental -- a lively tale of death and Pointe-Noire and Congo-Brazzaville.

- M.A.Orthofer, 15 September 2025

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Links:

• The New Press publicity page
• Serpent's Tail publicity page
• Éditions du Seuil publicity page
• Liebeskind publicity page
• 66th and 2nd publicity page
• Q & A at L'Éventail (French)

• Benzine (French)
• Bleisatz. (German)
• buzz
• En attendant Nadeau (French)
• Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud
• Frankfurter Rundschau (German)
• The Guardian
• Kirkus Reviews
• Le Monde (French)
• Nigrizia (Italian)
• The Observer
• Publishers Weekly
• Scritti d'Africa (Italian)
• The Skinny

• Official site
• Faculty page

• African Psycho
• Broken Glass
• The Death of Comrade President
• [The Lights of Pointe-Noire]
• Memoirs of a Porcupine
• The Negro Grandsons of Vercingetorix
• The Tears of the Black Man

• See Index of books from and about Africa
• See Index of French literature

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About the Author:

       Alain Mabanckou is from Congo-Brazzaville. He was born in 1966 and currently teaches in the US.

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© 2025 the complete review

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