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El Club de Lectura de la Universidad de Cádiz lee a Patrice Nganang
Literature is without a doubt one of the essential ways of bringing us closer to the African continent's social, political and cultural reality. However, a Spanish reader's access to that literary production is very limited, for reasons such as translation and the lack of inclusion into our country's book market.
Casa África, in its function of bringing Africa and Spain closer together through vehicles such as culture and the promotion of a very vast literary production of the African continent, once again collaborates with the Department of French and English Philology at the University of Cádiz who has chosen to read the work Tiempo de perro, from the writer from Cameroon Patrice Nganang. Casa África has provided 23 copies for the members of this reading club who will debate on this work on 16th January 2013 starting at 1p.m.
The work selected belongs to Casa África's Literature Collection, which in collaboration with Ediciones El Cobre-El Aleph, aims to translate the most important titles in African literature into Spanish, not only from well established writers but also those that are just emerging.
Temps de Chien (2001), narrated by a dog, has obtained prestigious prizes. This novel takes us to Cameroon and its highly populated neighbourhoods like Madagascar. There we find the bar 'The Customer is King' run by Massa Yo. We will also meet his wife, a doughnut seller, Mamá Mado and his son Sumi. But above all Mbudjak, the sniffing humanist dog and observer of the thousand and one events of the street, the place where the word has its cradle, where the word is king, where rumours grow, where riots roar. Tiempo de perro is an anthem novel to the towns of Africa who wait in turn for their voice, a eulogy to the word on the street that forges consciences, where French, English, Frenglish, Camfrenglish and Bamileké mix into a tasty mixed language. Follow this link to read a fragment of the work .
Patrice Nganang is a scholar of African literature and is defined as a promising author for fictional works. Born in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in 1970, he studied Comparative Literature and is currently professor of the University of Shippenburg (Pennsylvania, US) for the languages German and French, the language most used in the majority of his fictional work.
He is the author of many novels such as: La promesse des fleurs (1997), La joie de vivre (2003) and L'invention du beau regard (2004), although his most acclaimed novel is the one now chosen by the University of Cádiz for its reading club, Temps de Chien (2001), which in the year it was published obtained the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize, an award that is aimed at French speaking writers that live in the U.S.; as well as in 2002 the Grand Prix Littéraire de l'Afrique Noire, a literary prize for Leading French speaking African writers.
Nganang has tried to describe the poor areas of Yaoundé creating very original literature where comedy and tragedy are mixed with a colourful knowledge of French. As a scholar, the author is also a recognised specialist in African literature and habitual collaborator of several academic journals from all over the world.
More information on the reading club:
- Organised by: Department of French and English Philology of the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of the University of Cádiz.
- Coordinated by: Professor Inmaculada Díaz Narbona
- Contribution from: Casa África
- Time: 1p.m.
- Place: Board Room 1 at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of the University of Cádiz Avda. Doctor Gómez Ulla, s/n
