BOOKS FROM MALIThe Lieutenant of Kouta
Tags:
Set in Mali
Male author
Description:
The Lieutenant of Kouta is the first novel in Massa Makan Diabaté’s award-winning trilogy. Featuring an introduction by leading Diabaté scholar Cheick M. Chérif Keïta and Shane Auerbach, it tells the story, part tragicomic and part hagiographic, of an African lieutenant in the French Army who returns as a decorated hero from the battlefields of Europe to Kouta, a fictionalized version of the author’s own birthplace, the Malian town of Kita. Upon his return, Siriman Keita finds it difficult to adjust to village life as he navigates traditional customs in his attempts to create his place in the predominantly Muslim Kouta. The novel offers a rich and nuanced representation of Mali on the brink of independence; it is a tapestry of traditional Mandinka society and the French colonial apparatus, illustrating the dynamic interplay between the two. This text is, ultimately, a story of one man’s transformation coinciding with that of his country.
Reviews:
(1 month ago) |
28 Aug, 2025
This book is quite short at just over 100 pages, and I read it in two sittings. Going in, I felt like the description gave me a good sense of what the story would be about, but while reading, I often found myself a little lost.
A lot of events happen abruptly, and I wasn’t always sure why they mattered. There are also several group discussions, but I didn’t quite understand their purpose or what they were adding to the story. The timeline also threw me off; sometimes whole months would pass between chapters without much explanation, and other times it was clear that time had gone by, but not how much.
Because of that, I didn’t feel like I really connected with the Lieutenant’s struggles. The story isn’t told in first person, which maybe added to that distance. I know this is the first in a trilogy, and the next two books focus on different characters we meet here (the barber and the butcher), but as a standalone I felt like it was missing some depth and clarity. I would have appreciated more continuity and detail to really understand the bigger picture the author was trying to show.
That said, it was a quick read, and the premise itself was interesting enough that I wanted to see it through. I just wished I had a better grasp of the characters and what was happening from scene to scene.
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