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A review by clare_tan_wenhui
Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty by Alain Mabanckou
4.0
"I'm looking for a different road, the road to happiness, to walk down in my bare feet in the heat of the sun, even if the tarmac burns my feet. I'll go far, far away, to where all the road meet, where you find all the people who've gone on ahead, and look different now, to how they did on earth. I have to keep the road fixed carefully in my head, I don't want to find when I'm older that it's vanished and I'm stuck with lots of bad people who don't love me and want to hurt me.
I'll walk down this road the way crabs walk on the sand on the Cote Sauvage: you think they're going left, then they turn back, they stop for no reason, they go round in circles, they set off fast to the right, then come back to the left again. But what I like about the crabs is, they always know where they want to go, and sooner or later they get there, even though they've lots of different feet that all want different things and quarrel along the way. When I'm on the road to happiness, then I'll know I've finally grown up, that I'm twenty at last."
pg 308-309
A hilarious and heartwarming coming-of-age novel set in Africa. The depiction is rather realistic with dashes of sarcasm here and there (due to how young children are unable to grasp the absurdity of the corrupt and complicated adult nature). What I appreciate about the book is that it never veers overboard into the orientalism-fetish to pander to modern audiences.
I'll walk down this road the way crabs walk on the sand on the Cote Sauvage: you think they're going left, then they turn back, they stop for no reason, they go round in circles, they set off fast to the right, then come back to the left again. But what I like about the crabs is, they always know where they want to go, and sooner or later they get there, even though they've lots of different feet that all want different things and quarrel along the way. When I'm on the road to happiness, then I'll know I've finally grown up, that I'm twenty at last."
pg 308-309
A hilarious and heartwarming coming-of-age novel set in Africa. The depiction is rather realistic with dashes of sarcasm here and there (due to how young children are unable to grasp the absurdity of the corrupt and complicated adult nature). What I appreciate about the book is that it never veers overboard into the orientalism-fetish to pander to modern audiences.