ALSO BY PATRICE NGANANG
FICTION
Mount Pleasant
Dog Days
POETRY
elobi
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrice Nganang was born in Cameroon and is a novelist, a poet, and an essayist. His novel Dog Days received the Prix Marguerite Yourcenar and the Grand Prix littéraire d’Afrique noire. He is also the author of Mount Pleasant (FSG, 2016). He teaches comparative literature at Stony Brook University. You can sign up for email updates here.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Amy B. Reid is an award-winning translator who has worked with Patrice Nganang on multiple projects since 2001. In addition to When the Plums Are Ripe, she translated Nganang’s novels Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle (2006) and Mount Pleasant (2016); she is currently working on Empreintes de crabe (2018), the final volume in Nganang’s trilogy about Cameroonian independence. In 2016 she received a Literature Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for When the Plums Are Ripe. Her other translations include Queen Pokou: Concerto for a Sacrifice (2009) and Far from My Father (2014), both by Véronique Tadjo. She is a professor of French and Gender Studies at New College of Florida. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
This Story Does Not Begin in 1939
The Putsch in Ongola, 1940
1. June Vacation Back in the Village
2. The Collapse
3. The Old Man’s Four Eyes
4. Flourishes of a Far-Off Conversation
5. Like Mythical Cousins
6. Battling a Hypothetical Opponent
7. The Reversal
8. Creating a Poetry Circle in the Forest
9. The First Meeting
10. Let’s Talk About Poetry!
11. The Problematic Little Poetry Circle
12. A Black Man’s Roll of the Dice Can Abolish History’s Chances
13. The Man of Letters
14. The Daydreams of a Solitary Woodcutter
15. One Dream Too Many
16. Big Things Happen to the Little Guys
17. The Chiasmatic Enchantments of History
18. The Enchanting Colonel’s Village Sojourn
19. Hunting Down the Invisible Opponent
20. The Ghost
21. The First Recruit
22. War Council
23. And Speaking of Deception …
24. Ongola! Ongola! Ongola!
25. The Poor Neighborhoods of the French Empire
26. Nemesis
27. History’s Missed Connections
The Battle of Kufra, 1941
1. The Ax of Witchcraft
2. The Birth of the Senegalese Tirailleur
3. The Mother of the Market
4. Beyond the Privilege of Age
5. The Idea of Perfection
6. A New Cane for Leclerc
7. Bilong’s Moment
8. The Dunes of Nguet
9. Homework in History and Geography
10. The Courage of Tirailleur Bilong
11. German Shoes
12. The Neighbor Full of Surprises
13. The Poignant Hymn of the False Hilun
14. History’s Alexandrines
15. News from Edéa
16. The Equations of the Good Cameroonian
17. In Praise of the Sahara
19. The Black Force
20. War Is Not a Boxing Match
21. The Battlefield at Daybreak
22. A Domestic Squabble One Afternoon
23. Love’s Living Room
24. The Belly of Anger
25. Preparing for Battle
26. The Final Assault
27. The Angel of the Desert
28. Endgame
The Dunes of the Fezzan, 1942
1. What Fritz Had Understood
2. Hebga’s Parisian Dream
3. The Whitening of the Black Force
4. The Stutterer Speaks
5. Sporting Friendships
6. Friendship Above All Else
7. A Surprising Catch
8. The Universe in Ecstasy
9. That Schouain Rommel
10. Getting Caught Up
11. Identity Theft
12. I Am Not an Other
13. After the Rain, the Moment of Doubt
14. The Insurrection of Soldier Fouret
15. In Jerry’s Shadow
16. Night March
17. Kinderlieder
18. The Separation of a Loving Couple
19. How Many Months of Silence
20. A Problem for a Lawyer
21. Three Mutually Exclusive Mathematical Possibilities
22. Two Sorts of Tirailleurs, Plus One
23. Truth’s Infinite Probabilities
24. The Desert Campaign
25. Between Us Women
26. That’s How Friendships Are, Too
The Domestic Front has its Own Calendar, and Therefore its Own Stories, 1943
The Poet of Reality
A Few Words of Thanks and About My Sources
Translator’s Note
Also by Patrice Nganang
A Note About the Author and Translator
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2013 by Éditions Philippe Rey
Translation copyright © 2019 by Amy B. Reid
All rights reserved
Originally published in French in 2013 by Éditions Philippe Rey, France, as La saison des prunes
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2019
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71930-2
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This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).