What might otherwise be dressed up as a simple (if alluring) detective narrative becomes, in Sarr’s hands, a wildly expansive interrogation of everything from the nature of erotic love to the literary canon. We traverse the gamut of genres — the mystery, the ghost story, the philosophical novel, the historical novel, the magical realist tale — as Sarr navigates a spider’s web that enmeshes fact and fiction, biography and gossip, authenticity and plagiarism, fame and infamy ... Whether or not Sarr has another great book waiting for us on the other side of the void, The Most Secret Memory of Men is incontestably one that demanded to be written.
Brainy and beautiful ... He uncovers fragments of Elimane’s story, which is rendered in a dizzying range of voices, forms and styles, including diary entries, press clippings, book reviews, interviews, letters and oral stories. These threads skillfully connect into a spider’s web that entrap Diégane; the more he finds out, the more he wants to know ... Fashioned out of stellar material ... At its best, The Most Secret Memory of Men reminds us that we ought to read for pleasure, not affirmation; for argument, not answer; and for investigation, not presumption. This is a novel by a lover of books, for lovers of books, and like any true love it demands nothing short of surrender.
A rollicking literary mystery dedicated to Ouologuem and loosely inspired by his disappearance ... An aerobatic feat of narrative invention, whirling between noir, fairy tale, satire, and archival fiction in its self-reflexive meditation on the nature of literary legend ... Sarr witheringly scrutinizes the cultural Françafrique—a word for France’s geopolitical influence over its former colonies—that relegates African fiction to the status of veiled memoir, ethnographic study, or folkloric entertainment. Defying these categories, he delivers a demiurgic story of literary self-creation ... A deft caricaturist ... Lush and immediate.
The style as well as the sweep is Bolañoesque: surreal metaphors, multi-page dream descriptions and a sense of ease in whichever world capital the novel finds itself ... The gags give the reader something to hold on to amid labyrinthine turns that recall Bolaño in their challenges as much as their pleasures.
Sarr turns his attention to the challenges of publishing while Black, exploring the gap between literature and the literary life ... It includes a host of voices and forms, skillfully rendered in Lara Vergnaud’s sensitive translation, from Faye’s diary entries to critical reviews of Elimane to the intricate oral narratives Faye collects during his search. The novel’s geography extends from Amsterdam to Buenos Aires with stops in Dakar, rural Senegal and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as if to leap over the question of center and periphery. This is a bold response to the threat of silence: to say everything, to be all of literature ... Perhaps what African literature needs is not an obliterating spotlight but an escape route into the solitude from which all writing springs.
Brilliantly executed ... The author never sacrifices story for cleverness, though, delivering a rich narrative about art as a lasting marker of ephemeral individual existence. Literary mystery fans will be captivated.
