Harare Review of Books

259 pages.

First published on Mar 7, 2023 (World Editions)

Fiction.

I went into this with high expectations, which is always a tricky thing—unavoidable, however, if you’ve enjoyed an author before. A Season in Rihata was one of my favourite reads of 2022, and I thought—assumed—this would be the same mix of fable/kind of folktale and semi-historical fiction. I like to go into a book without reading too much about it so I can form my own opinions; this worked against me here.

The central conceit of the book is that it is a parody of the life of Jesus Christ: Pascal is also born in a manger, there are drunken shepherd stand-ins, an angel figure appears, there’s a (maybe) miracle at a wedding, and so on. All of this is explored in about half the book, and it simply tries too hard. It feels like it should be funny (and sometimes drew a smile, I’ll admit), but is simply too slapstick, too on the nose to truly enjoy. It’s true that it can function as a kind of skewering of the fantasticalness of the religious texts, I suppose; but it really didn’t work for me. What worked much better was the later part of the book, when Conde is just making up the protagonist’s life without the burden of him being “the son of God” (partly because God never appears); if Pascal had simply been a man who had set out to fix the world, I would have enjoyed it more.

The second thing was the writing. I wish I had the facility to read it in the original language, because I feel the translation may be at fault here (perhaps this is different in the final version? I read the ARC). The book felt choppy where it should have been striving for jaunty, and seemed to keep hitting the wrong notes. More likely to be something to be laid at the author’s door, however, is that the supporting characters were mostly unmemorable, and Pascal seemed to go over the same peak and through the same valley over and over, just in different places, which was tiresome. Twice might be interesting for some; more than that was just exasperating for me. Also, his relations with women were boring and repetitive.

I wanted to love this book, but I just didn’t. It took me longer to read than it should have, because Pascal was simply annoying to me. I was bored. Being, possibly, Condé’s last book, this is an important read; but it just isn’t her best.

Thank you to World Editions and to NetGalley for this ARC.