by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, translated from the French by Roland Glasser (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Deep Vellum)

Relatively short, but consciously powerful, Tram 83 is one of those books that draws you in with the first note and carries you through every variation and improvisation before ejecting you with a last crescendo.

I read Tram 83 in one sitting, and I think that this is the best way to experience it (if possible). After all, the swirling, kaleidoscopic, jazzy, crude, and hyper atmosphere of the novel (which makes jazz central to its expression of a nonexistent State) is best appreciated through complete immersion. This story of Lucien (a writer trying to hold on to some utopian vision of art) and Requiem (a gangster and trafficker who clings to his power over the debauched world of a fictional separatist African city) offers us a vision of modern colonialism and the devastating cycle of war after war of liberation that has gripped nations across the African continent for over a century.

Mujila himself hails from Democratic Republic of Congo, and Tram 83 is his first (and already award-winning) novel. We see his exploration of literary ideals clashing with the mundane, even grotesque, necessities of daily life in a city that has become unmoored from a state and a history. It is Tram 83, the city’s most infamous nightclub, that acts as a gathering place for prostitutes, criminals, tourists, soldiers, and others. Here Lucien comes night after night, sometimes with his friend/sworn enemy Requiem, sometimes with his would-be publisher Malingeau, and each time he writes down snatches of prose that capture the whirlwind, wild nature of this uninhibited place.

But above all, it is the profiteering tourists who, together with corrupt politicians, exploit the diamond mines and suck out the wealth that they offer. Thus money, corruption, and sexual abandon characterize the nightclub where everyone who seeks prosperity gathers. Tram 83 is the petri dish and Mujila is the scientist peering through a microscope at the chaotic and carnivalesque results of this gathering.

It is jazz, though, that gives Tram 83 its rhythm and body. Mujila set the novel in a nightclub, after all, where music and conversation mix with sights and smells until everything melds into a series of tangible experiences. Each chapter opens with a line or paragraph that’s striking in its seriousness, as compared to the more casual, colloquial language of the novel itself. For example:

Strategy means resolving a given situation intelligently.

Requiem and Malingeau, or when two crooks drink to each other’s health.

This latter opening (to chapter 14), which sounds like the title of some 18th-century English play, then leads into a series of stage directions:

Tram 83, interior.

In the background, a saxophonist performing a solo.

Center-forward, the young ladies of Avignon in their vestal robes eyeing up all the masculine clients.

This constant stylistic flux embodies the “swinging rhythms, keyboards, clarinets, saxophones, drums, and electric guitars” that can be heard in the nightclub. Even opera finds its place in this novel- chapter 25 describes a nightclub singer who looks like, and even sort of sounds like, the famous Maria Callas.

Such a shifting, swirling novel poses its own unique translation challenges, but Roland Glasser has expertly captured the story and its rhythms and made the English translation seem like the original French. We read this book with the understanding that “translation” is itself a character- Lucien trying to translate his experiences into literature, criminals translating scams into money, music translating emotions into sounds. With Tram 83, Mujila shows us a liminal, shifting world, and Glasser has captured it for English ears. A performance like this one deserves to be rewarded.

I was lucky enough, during the last Brooklyn Book Festival, to catch celebrated Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila and translator Roland Glasser at the front end of a whirlwind tour marking the release of I remember being struck not only by the force and freshness of the passages they read, but also by the physicality of their recitals. Both kept time with measured flicks of finger and heel, driving home the importance of music to the novel—not only as a theme, but also as an organizing principle of the narrative. (Glasser, in fact, remarked that his process involved re-reading passages in French until he could mark their rhythm without looking at the page; only then would he set about noting down the English.)

At the same time the Kalashnikov swing of its prose challenges the conventional opposition of style and substance, Tram 83 also dips into tradition with a tale of misadventures that recalls picaresque narratives of yore, complete with chapter headings that lay out the events to come, and a friendship (of sorts) suffused with jealousy and betrayal.

Our first stop inside the world of the novel is Northern Station, the ruins of the rail system that is the legacy of colonialism and mineral extraction in the region. Beside us on the platform is Requiem, a former Marxist who has thrown himself headlong into the frenzied capitalism of the newly independent City-State where he lives. He’s involved in a number of illicit operations, and collects compromising photos of powerful local figures as a form of personal insurance. He is waiting for Lucien, with whom he shares a complicated past and little else: Lucien, a former history student and aspiring writer in a place that needs “doctors, mechanics, carpenters, and garbage collectors, but certainly not dreamers,” does his best to remain above the fray in the struggle for survival of the “students, the diggers, the baby-chicks, the for-profit tourists . . . the single-mamas, the human organ dealers, the child-soldiers” around him.

Tram 83 plays out, in many ways, as a call and response between these two incompatible ideologies: the cynical pragmatism of Requiem and the other denizens of the City-State, and Lucien’s naïve—and, ultimately, rather elitist—allegiance to the world of letters. A call and response, that is, with a healthy dose of “background noise,” most notably the refrain of the single-mamas and underage baby-chicks on the hunt for their next clients: “Do you have the time?”

Though he distances himself enough from the local population to warrant a beating that feels like two outside the bar from which the novel gets its name, Lucien eventually, predictably, gets dragged into the tumult. As he drafts and rewrites his magnum opus (“a stage tale that considers this country from a historical perspective. The Africa of Possibility: Lumumba, the Fall of an Angel, or the Pestle-Mortar Years . . . Characters include Che Guevara, Sékou Touré, Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Lumumba, Martin Luther King, Ceaușescu, not forgetting the dissident General”) for a Swiss expat publisher named Malingeau, he stumbles into robbery and romance—with notebook in hand all the while. But first, he has to arrive:

Northern Station. Friday. Around seven or nine in the evening.

“Patience, friend, you know full well our trains have lost all sense of time.”

The Northern Station was going to the dogs. It was essentially an unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks, and locomotives that called to mind the railroad built by Stanley, cassava fields, cut-rate hotels, greasy spoons, bordellos, Pentecostal churches, bakeries, and noise engineered by men of all generations and nationalities combined . . . According to the fickle but ever-recurring legend, the seeds of all resistance movements, all wars of liberation, sprouted at the station, between two locomotives. And as if that weren’t enough, the same legend claims that the building of the railroad resulted in numerous deaths attributed to tropical diseases, technical blunders, the poor working conditions imposed by the colonial authorities—in short, all the usual clichés.

Northern Station. Friday. Around seven or nine.

These opening lines introduce many of the motifs that give the narrative form. The dilapidated train station, a recurring backdrop in the novel, stands in for the broken promise of economic “progress” (as exploitative and destabilizing as that progress proved to be) and provides an ironic foil to the real motor of local society, Tram 83, where deals are made, treaties broken, and livelihoods eked out through seemingly infinite variations on the theme of extortion.

Time is also, always, of the essence: most notably, in the circular quality it takes on through the novel’s many riffs (“Do you have the time?”) and the permanent twilight of its central locale, populated as it is by sleepwalkers and night owls. It’s here, I would argue, between tempo and temporality that Tram 83 does its most interesting work, presenting the harshness of life in the City-State, complete with the claustrophobia generated by the novel’s ubiquitous refrains, with an unmistakable sense of play. Rejecting conservative formal and conceptual models—the African literature of “squalor, poverty, syphilis, and violence” bemoaned by Malingeau—Tram 83 is at once a celebration and a lament, a Bildungsroman sans Bildung, a masterful exercise in style, and a valuable contribution to the conversation about what literature in translation is and can be.

The title refers to Tram 83, a nightclub where wealthy tourists, gangsters, miners, and prostitutes (ranging in age from 12 to “ageless”) go every night, all night. The Tram is what holds the crumbling city together—where Requiem, his cohorts, and the city’s prostitutes peddle to wealthy tourists from around the world. The nightclub is also famous for its jazz music, in particular the Railroad Diva, a hugely talented jazz singer, whose spellbinding performances prompt the patrons to simultaneously lose control of every bodily function, fall in love, despair, and rejoice. The Tram’s jazz music elevates the nightclub to more than a Sodom-and-Gomorrah-like pit of debauchery while simultaneously keeping everything in check.

Jazz might seem out of place in contrast to the club’s explosive atmosphere, but it’s a timeless feature of the nightclub, spanning and surviving its many owners, names, and decades of existence.

You don’t listen to jazz to get a whiff of sugar cane or reconnect with Negro consciousness or savor the beauty of the notes: you listen to jazz because you have to listen jazz when you make your bed on banknotes . . . Jazz is a sign of nobility, it’s the music of the rich and the newly rich, of those who build this beautiful broken world . . . When the musicians get jazzing, all of Tram 83 stirs from its sleeping sickness . . . Jazz is the only lever used by all the riffraff of Tram 83 to switch social class as one would subway cars.

In the context of the novel, jazz carries with it connotations of privilege and elitism, but becomes an equalizer through which each differentiated patron can collectively have “a chance to leave their bodies for the space of a tremolo.”

Tram 83 reads like a modern, twisted The Great Gatsby; a somewhat naïve, well-intentioned young writer adapts to the world of a self-made, nouveau-riche man who is at the center of a capitalist city’s social hub. But instead of becoming disillusioned by and abandoning the gaudy, corrupt lifestyle he explores, the writer finds success in the volatile African city and becomes infatuated with Tram 83’s ability to unite its visitors regardless of their wealth, nationality, age, profession, etc., into one energetic, resilient representation of humanity.

Though Tram 83’s plotline and intense imagery resemble that of The Great Gatsby, it’s a much quicker, more visceral, aggressive sort of book. As soon as the novel began, I was bombarded with the graphic, almost violently sexual antics the Tram’s inhabitants undertake on a nightly basis. The money-fueled, drug-addled underworld of Tram 83 is so shocking that it is often darkly humorous. As Lucien becomes acquainted with Tram 83’s women, he notes,

Steatopygia remained the epitome of beauty. All the honeys swore by Brazilian buttocks alone. You had to have those buttocks, or nothing. They would desperately slug a particular soy-based drink, take pills, and swallow food intended for pigs in order to increase the area of their rumps. The results left much to be desired: buttocks shaped like pineapples, avocadoes, balloons, or baseballs; oblique, square, or rectangular buttocks; buttocks that pedaled all by themselves, and so on.

Mujila offers imagery like this casually and conversationally, seeking neither to judge nor exalt the Tram’s regulars.

The way Mujila, in Roland Glasser’s translation, uses a lighthearted voice to describe the Tram’s wild, perverse mischief envelops the reader in this bizarre lifestyle, and even makes its excitement and freedom seem, at times, somewhat appealing. The carefree air of the language fits perfectly with the book and gives Glasser’s translation a skillful confidence. Within the first few paragraphs of the novel, a woman approaches Requiem and says, “Do you have the time, citizen?” a phrase I rapidly learned is the prostitutes’ way of announcing their availability. As I adapted to the city’s slang and colloquialisms (for instance, learning that prostitutes between ages 12 and 16 are called “baby-chicks”), the conversational tone allowed me to feel like an insider in the novel’s surreal world. Tram 83 is often grotesque and morbid, but the appeal of the Tram’s energy is as undeniable as the joy in reading the extremely, comically long list of clientele to the club:

Inadvertent musicians and elderly prostitutes . . . and Pentecostal preachers . . .. and transvestites and second-foot shoe peddlers . . . and former transsexuals and polka dancers and pirates of the high seas . . . and human organ dealers . . . and Siamese twins .. . . and drinkers of adulterated milk.

The city dwellers’ raucous and nightly adventures are so daring and unrestrained I almost admire them for it. Their extreme behavior is irrevocably intriguing; though their lives often seem horrible, I would welcome an opportunity to live in their world for a day out of sheer curiosity. Ultimately, the Tram’s visitors have no choice but to adopt the flexible, emotionally aloof attitude that is common to both novel and nightclub; any rigidity, formality or prudishness would result in a failure to finish the novel, much less survive in the city-state.

Tram 83 offers an unaffected view of humanity that is at once repulsive, hilarious, and oddly uplifting. By the end of the novel, I couldn’t help but be attached to the Tram and its patchwork of bizarre clientele, and I felt almost at home in the midst of the novel’s madness, including offhand discussions of 10 year olds giving birth to 21-pound babies. Mankind is united in its pursuit of sex, money, fame, and sensuality; this is neither admirable nor shameful, and these universal desires make us human. The novel, like the nightclub, is eccentric and somewhat disturbing, yet inclusive and universally appealing.

Caitlin is one of our interns at Open Letter this summer—which, effectively, is the first summer in a long time that 2/3 of our interns haven’t been named “Hannah.” (Which—hi, Hannahs!)

Here’s the beginning of Caitlin’s review:

Fiston Mwanza Mujila is an award-winning author, born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who now, at 33, lives in Austria. From what I could find, much of his work is influenced by the Congo’s battle for independence and its effect on civilian lives. His first novel, Tram 83, is the story of Requiem, a gangster rapidly gaining power and influence in a fictional, dystopian African city and his friend, Lucien, a writer who visits him and is sucked into Requiem’s corrupt empire and the city’s outrageously extravagant, filthy-glamorous nightlife.

The title refers to Tram 83, a nightclub where wealthy tourists, gangsters, miners, and prostitutes (ranging in age from 12 to “ageless”) go every night, all night. The Tram is what holds the crumbling city together—where Requiem, his cohorts, and the city’s prostitutes peddle to wealthy tourists from around the world. The nightclub is also famous for its jazz music, in particular the Railroad Diva, a hugely talented jazz singer, whose spellbinding performances prompt the patrons to simultaneously lose control of every bodily function, fall in love, despair, and rejoice. The Tram’s jazz music elevates the nightclub to more than a Sodom-and-Gomorrah-like pit of debauchery while simultaneously keeping everything in check.

For the rest of the review, go here.