Current installment of Tommi Reads the World – we’re in the Bs.
Country: Benin
Title: Snares Without End
Author: Olympe Bhêly-Quenum
Language: French
Translator: Dorothy S. Blair
Publisher: Longman Group Limited (English version) 1981; first published 1960
Bhêly-Quenum’s Snares Without End is a slim novel about destiny, colonization, and the monsters inside. Admittedly, it’s been a long time since I’ve read Camus, but the second section of this novel certainly has some echoes.
The first half of the novel paints a most idyllic scene with Ahouna caring for his family’s livestock. When Ahouna is a boy, the family has some troubles and their father employs some dark arts to reverse their luck. It works, but at what price? Ahouna’s father, forced to work in servitude for three months, kills himself. Even this seems but a blip in the novel as the idyllic countryside scenes with Ahouna playing his beautiful music continue. It’s a rather odd pacing.
Ahouna gets married and has several children. His wife accuses him of adultery, and this awakens a monster in him. Instead of killing his wife, which he considers, he flees. While running away, he kills an innocent woman for no reason. The first half of the novel is what Ahouna tells the man he encounters after the murder – his explanation for his descent into madness. What follows is Ahouna in prison and a less idyllic depiction of colonization than the first half.
From a history POV, the timing of the novel is very interesting as France granted full autonomy to what became the Republic of Benin in 1958 and full independence came in August of 1960, the year this work was first published.
A Girl Named Tommi 