PositiveFull Stop\"Nevada Days is a quiet and profoundly singular portrait of Northern Nevada ... It’s a subdued book about place, rendering Nevada as its central subject ... If readers are looking for a clear plot and a dramatic arc, they’re likely to be disappointed. This is a book for readers looking for skillful writing with character and place very much at its center.\
Alain Mabanckou, Trans. by Helen Stevenson
RaveFull StopWe get glimpses of the political changes through Moses, the book’s main character and narrator, who, when we first meet him, is a well-meaning thirteen year old orphan in the countryside just outside of Pointe-Noire … The book is funny and tear-inducing because the first-person, reportage style of the writing shows such a singular view of the world through an adolescent’s — then young man’s — then madman’s — eyes … The world of this book is multi-ethnic and multilingual, so retaining foreign words for the English reader is a strategic fidelity. For the American English reader, phrases like ‘laughed like a drain’ further texture the translation, reminding the reader that, as Mabanckou said about Congolese rhythms in French, every language exceeds its national borders.
