I've been trying to read more, and I think that it would help me to retain what I read a little more and have some record of what I read if I make a blog entry about each title, no matter how brief or insipid. So, I'm going to give it a shot.
Black Moses is set primarily in an orphanage in the People's Republic of the Congo in the 1970s. Moses was left there by his mother in his infancy, and he's picked on by the older kids. The orphanage undergoes a transition from indoctrinating their wards with Catholicism to indoctrinating their wards with Communism as the political winds shift over a period of years. Moses has an opportunity to run away with his former bullies in early adolescence, and does so. He ends up working as an errand boy in a brothel in Pointe-Noire, working his way up to a more prominent position, and then abruptly having a breakdown after the political winds shift again and the brothel is bulldozed.
The storyline is interesting and engaging, but I had a hard time understanding the individual characters, among which Moses is the only constant presence. Moses especially is an enigma, lurching from weakling to rising ghetto boss to pathetic drunk over the course of a few pages. Maybe that's intentional, contributing to the general sense of unease that surrounds the book's plot? I'll give Mabanckou the benefit of the doubt.
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