Pas entièrement convaincu par ce livre. Autant il y a quelques moments vraiment prenants avec une langue savoureuse, autant certaines trivialités brisent la poésie du texte.

Jak to jest być elegantem z Konga, mieszkającym we Francji? Czym zajmuje się zadkolog? Czy twój arabski sklepikarz musi o tobie wiedzieć wszystko? Jaka jest Pierwotna Barwa i jak to jest mieć czarnoskórego sąsiada, który nie cierpi Murzynów? To wszystko i o wiele więcej w krótkiej, lecz napisanej z lekkością powieści Alaina Mabanckou.Nie oczekiwałem tak przyjemnej lektury, bo wydawało mi się, że będzie to książka obarczona brzemieniem społecznych rozrachunków i zdeterminowana emigranckim punktem...

This is a story that could be reduced to maybe a four-page dialectic without all the fuss. If you want to spend a lot of time learning what you probably already know about the French, read Black Bazaar.

This fiction story is about the narrator counting to readers his life story as an African immigrant from small Congo living in Paris. The narrator wrote about his African immigrant friends from a local bar, his ex-girlfriend, a French born with African parents, his past in Congo prior to immigrating and his life in Paris ever since arriving. Most of the story is set in Paris in the 1990's/2000's and only a small part of it is set in Congo. Through narration, dialogues, and/or descriptions of var...

I'll be honest: I picked up this book because of the cover. I was drawn to the dapper gentleman in yellow, who I soon came to know as 'The Buttologist'.Black Bazaar is his story, or rather a fictionalised form of Mabanckou's life as a Congolese man in France, navigating his local community of African diaspora. After his girlfriend and daughter leave him for a charming drummer, our protagonist takes to writing out his feelings and experiences in diary form. Despite this overarching plot never qui...

My sister recommended this book to me after hearing good reviews in the radio. It's a good quick read. There is no strong story, it's more or less an accumulation of anecdotes about the life of the black community in Paris. About everyday life, the relationship with the home-country and the coping with the history of conolization. This may sound hard to read but it's told in a humorous way. The narrator and most of the characters are likable and funny (even though they don't always act like that...

Non. J'aime beaucoup Mabankou, j'adore son style mais suivre pendant trois cent pages un abruti qui ne réalise même pas à quel point il est bête... Non. Je refuse de recommander les aventures d'un minable, même si c'est un minable africain qui vit à Paris.

Buttologist, christened because of his admiration of women's backsides, lives in a bedsit in Paris; not ideal but preferable to the cramped dormitory he shared when he first arrived in France with a fake ID card 15 years ago. Originally from Brazzaville Congo (not the Big Congo, which 'still should be called Zaire'), Buttologist now works for a printing company and hangs out with his fellow immigrant friends at an Afro-Cuban bar in Les Halles, where he enjoys Pelforth beer and women-watching. As...

Après "Verre cassé" et "Mémoires de porc ép"ic, Alain Mabanckou nous décrit dans son" Black Bazar" (un peu d'humour noir, déjà dans le titre), la vie de Fessologue, le narrateur surnommé ainsi car il est particulièrement intéressé – et spécialisé – par la face B des femmes (leur derrière). C'est plus fort que lui et il en fait une référence très importante quand il compare les femmes (ce qui pour lui est une science qui remonte à l'origine des temps).Sa compagne – Couleur d'origine - vient de le...

Mabankou dresse encore un portrait (assez drôle) de la communauté africaine au sein de la France. Une Afrique désunie avec ses querelles d'ethnies. Des personnages colorés comme Paul du grand Congo, l'Ivoirien, le franco Ivoirien, Vladimir le camerounais, Louis-Philippe, l'écrivain Haïtien et le voisin antillais Mr Hippocrate. Tous donnent leur opinion sur la condition de l'homme noir en terrain blanc. Humour, dérision sont au rendez-vous. Certaines expressions sont hilarantes. Mais pour moi, De...

Mabanckou is that insidious familiar every great countries literature needs. He is erudite yet quick to make a bawdy joke. He is stylistic but never losing sight of the oral tradition. . This book seems to be really critiquing French colonialism in the many diverse ways. Unfortunately I know little to nothing about French politics so much b of this went over my head. The real star of this book are the sections specifically on literature. Mabanckou pokes fun at the notion of a monolithic African

J’ai bien aimé l’humour et le ton décalé de ce livre mais à la longue j’ai trouvé un peu lassante la superposition des discours souvent caricaturaux et racistes que rapporte le narrateur. J’ai eu du mal à savoir où allait le livre. Finalement, les références intertextuelles se multiplient, ainsi que les avis et les points de vue mais on ne sait pas toujours ce que partage le narrateur et ce qu’il se contente de montrer comme une opinion existante et donc on ne sait exactement que retirer de sa l...

This is an odd book to review. It is ‘about’ race and sex in a way that can obscure its literary quality. Meaning: A black person will certainly react very differently to it than a white person. And a woman very differently than a man. Of course, you could say that about almost every work of art, but I think it’s true to an extreme about Black Bazaar.All that said, as an old white guy who loves Paris, I really enjoyed this book. I summoned up Google maps and plotted the places mentioned in the n...

I really like Alain Mabanckou and can easily relate with the mixed bag of characters and situations in Africa and the diaspora he usually explores. This time characters seemed a bit half baked and pale copies of the more successful ones encountered in his "Broken Glass" and batshit crazy "Memoirs of a Porcupine. Not a bad intro but in my opinion not his best work

Because I enjoyed the bits about life in Pointe-Noire and the education about how it came about that there's 2 countries with the name Congo in them. I had wondered what had happened to Zaire. I vaguely remembered. I also like that a lot of real people, including authors and musicians, are cited in the book. When I got to the part where they are arguing about Miles Davis being ugly or not ugly, I had to Google him to see who I agreed with since I know of him but never really knew what he looked

This was my fourth book by Alain Mabanckou, and I have mixed feelings about it. I liked the set-up with a Congolese Sapper bouncing around Paris, conversing almost entirely with other immigrants, but there wasn't much of a story. However, this is typical with Mabanckou's books mainly being about the side-stories and back stories from different characters, and also the most interesting parts. It was mostly just the narrator ("Buttologist") suffering the indignities of life as a man, combined with...

I read this novel first in French, and loved it.Then I decided to read the English rendition by Sarah Ardizzone. I cannot emphasize how pleasantly surprised I was by the English. I did not compare the texts line by line, but the translation seemed to be absolutely spot on, and I felt that had I read only the English, I would still have come away nothing "lost in translation." Impressive!

Nie mogę powiedzieć, żeby mnie ta książka zwaliła z nóg, ale mimo to była to dobra lektura. Trafiło do mnie poczucie humoru autora, a wiele obserwacji dotyczącej afrykańsko-karaibskiej diaspory w Paryżu jest naprawdę trafnych. Nie ma tu jakiejś szczególnej fabuły. Ot, kongijski elegant zwany Zadkologiem (gdyż w tej części kobiecego ciała lubuje się najbardziej) zostaje porzucony przez swoją partnerkę, Pierwotną Barwę, która zabiera ich córkę i wyjeżdża z innym facetem do Konga - co ważne, nie te...

J’ai aimé les passages savoureux qui nous plongent dans les quartiers noirs de Paris, les vendeuses à la sauvette, les « sapeurs », les piliers de bar Afro tous plus vrais que nature. Il y a beaucoup de monologues hyper réalistes de personnages que l’on est sûr d’avoir déjà croisés.Cependant, en termes d’intrigue, j’avoue que je reste sur ma faim. Il se passe bien peu de choses, c’est avant tout un livre d’ambiance à mon sens. J’ai lu ce petit livre assez lentement par manque d’intérêt.

Drole, facile à lire... j'ai beaucoup aimé.