Seven Houses in France
A Novel
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A brooding novel of colonial intrigue in the Congo, from the author of The Accordionist's Son and Obabakoak
The year is 1903, and the garrison of Yangambi on the banks of the Congo is under the command of Captain Lalande Biran. The captain is also a poet whose ambition is to amass a fortune and return to the literary cafés of Paris. His glamorous wife, Christine, has a further ambition: to own seven houses in France, a house for every year he has been abroad. At Lalande Biran's side are the ex-legionnaire van Thiegel, a brutal womanizer, and the servile, treacherous Donatien, who dreams of running a brothel. The officers spend their days guarding enslaved rubber-tappers and kidnapping young girls, and at their hands the jungle is transformed into a wild circus of human ambition and absurdity. But everything changes with the arrival of a new officer and brilliant marksman: the enigmatic Chrysostome Liege. An outstanding new novel from the critically acclaimed and prizewinning author Bernardo Atxaga, Seven Houses in France is a blackly comic tale which reveals the darkest sides of human desire.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Atxaga has been compared to Conrad, but the writer's captivating literary anthropologies don't seek to edify or shed light on the human condition. In his new, shamefully enjoyable novel, set in the Belgian Congo in the early part of the last century, the arrival of a devout and taciturn young officer into a contingent of colorful colonial soldiers on a remote jungle outpost on the River Congo sets off a palpitating chain of events. Chrysostome Li ge is the best marksman in the Congo, a fact that his commander, the highfalutin poet-officer Capt. Lalande Biran, decides to use to his advantage first using Li ge to restore order in the bush, and then for more personal reasons. Captain Biran's beautiful wife wishes to acquire a seventh property in France, in fashionable St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, "one of the most expensive places in the civilized world," forcing him to engage in a risky contraband scheme with his covetous subordinate, the psychotic Lieutenant Van Thiegel. Atxaga possesses an uncanny gift for details bordering on the forensic, and he breathes life into this bevy of invariably perfectly pitched characters from Captain Biran's cowardly orderly Donatien to the mysterious Club Royal bartender Livo, who finally decides to take matters into his own hands when Van Thiegel perpetuates one final, inexcusable outrage. Nearly impossible to put down, Atxaga's thrilling colonial masterpiece pulses with a kind of elemental power, like the Congo River itself.
