Grand Menteur
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: March 17, 2017 7:44 PM | Last Updated: April 5, 2017
Jean Marc Ah-Sen
The secret world of Mauritian street gangs is not for the faint of heart. Fraught with peril and mischief, its inner workings are a mystery to the daughter of one of its most valued members: Serge, the Grand Menteur. A liar of exceptional calibre whose sole responsibility is to purposefully confuse police with alibis, the Menteur fears for the criminal future he has unwittingly introduced into his daughter's life, when her clear knack for violence attracts the notice of senior gang members.
Mauritian Kreol, English and French blend together into a heady brew of language in Grand Menteur. Written in a nuanced style reflecting the island-nation's convoluted history of colonialism, this debut novel by Jean Marc Ah-Sen sheds an unflinching light on the poverty and down-and-out hardship of a shadow class of immigrants from the 1940s to the '80s. (From BookThug)
From the book
The story of how my father came into contact with this network of delinquents is rather a hopeless one. I stress this point because solicitors and constables always believe a life of crime involves an overdetermination of choice, like you could decide the quality of water that came out of the Colmar Canal into your taps any more than you could decide the colour of your skin. The architecture of survival does not care about those who quibble with its provisions for choice: there is always unfinished business somewhere or other, and an axe to grind can meet life's challenge. Suffice it to say that holed up somewhere in a David Street tannery, poor and left to his own devices, my eight-year-old father would reflect silently on his exclusion, dreaming of the material world.
From Grand Menteur by Jean Marc Ah-Sen ©2015. Published by BookThug.