A trail of crab tracks

Family dynamics and the siren song of a war-torn homeland play out in Nganang's elegant, involving latest (after When the Plums Are Ripe). In 2013, Nithap moves to New Jersey to stay with his son, Tanou, and his family, after a long career as a doctor in his native Cameroon. Tanou struggles to connect with Nithap, who has his own trouble settling in, though he eventually finds kindred spirits in Tanou's older married neighbors, a retired American poet and Frenchwoman. A road trip exploring monuments of the American Civil War only amplifies the bewilderment of "Old Papa." Flashbacks involve Nithap's travails in Cameroon under French rule, where he fought in the 1960 revolution that led to Cameroon's independence. Then, Tanou returns alone to Cameroon after his mother dies, to retrace his father's history. The story moves fluidly through time and location, providing juicy juxtapositions. Nganang's genius is in his ability to express the personal and the panoramic with equal artistry. Both intimate and sweeping, this epic brings a satisfying and profound closure to historic events. (June)

A complex, sometimes didactic story of war and remembrance by Cameroon-born novelist Nganang, who calls himself "Caretaker of the Republic" in this book's acknowledgments. "What is a world with no utopia worth?" So asks a man named Ouandié, the leader--in life as well as in Nganang's latest novel--of a guerrilla army fighting first the French colonists of Cameroon and later rival ethnic groups. The question is one that arises, in various forms, throughout the narrative. Nganang's story opens in snowy New Jersey, where an academic named Tanou lives with his family. His father--who, Tanou comes to understand, bears a different last name from his--has come from Cameroon to live with them, leaving his own family behind, and now, it appears, he is suffering from the onset of Alzheimer's disease. There's more to his forgetfulness and "secretive nature" than that: Nithap, renowned as a doctor in his homeland, has much that he'd like to forget as a veteran of a vicious civil war in which horrible atrocities were committed by both sides--and which Nganang portrays in graphic detail to drive home the terror of the time. When Tanou travels to Cameroon, he begins to follow the "trail of crab tracks" of Nganang's title, which refers both to an arcane script developed to represent the language of the Bamileke peoples of western Cameroon and to the symbol adapted by Ouandié's rebel army: "The UPC's mistake," observes one woman, "is that they chose the crab as their party emblem! The ant, that's what I would have said, or termites, even. But the crab! The most egotistical of all animals!" As Tanou teases out his father's difficult past, he learns that conditions in his native country have scarcely improved since independence, still riven by corruption and tyranny, and that the young people he meets are eager to resume the struggles of old. An effective continuation of Nganang's project to capture his country's history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.