A gripping literary mystery which unravels the fascinating life of a maligned Black author, based on Yamboi Ouologuem. In 2018, Diegane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer in Paris discovers a legendary book. In 1938, a novel called Labyrinth of Inhumanity ws praised as “the masterpiece of a young African Negro, but due to some obscure scandal, the book disappeared without a trace along with its author, who was TC Elimane. No one knows what became of its author, once hailed as the “Black Rimbad” the book caused a scandal. Enthralled by this mystery Diegane decides to search for TC Elimane going down the path that will force him to confront the great tragedies of history, from colonialism to the Holocaust. Alongside his investigation, Diegane becomes part of a group of young African writers in Paris. They talk, drink , make love, philosophise about the role of exile in artistic creation. Diegane goes particularly close to two women; the seductive Siga, who holds so many secrets, and the photojournalist Aida, impossible to pin down.

The Most Secret Memory of Men is an astonishing novel about the choice between living and writing, and the desire to transcend the divide between Africa and the West. Above all, It is an ode to literature and its timelessness.

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, born in Senegal in 1990, moved to France to study literature and soon began writing fiction. His debut novel published in 2015 and translated into English as Brotherhood, made him famous, his second book about  to appear in English was The Silence of the Choir, made him the youngest winner of the World Literature Prize in 2018, In 2021, The Most Secret Memory of Men won France’s highest literary honour, the Prix Goncourt. 

The story begins in 2019, Diegane, who was born in Senegal is now based between Amsterdam and Paris. A budding author, he is wary of the occasionally comfortable often humiliating status forced on writers from former colonies. 

When Diegane chances on a copy of The Labyrinth, it has a visceral effect, leaving him shivering and destroyed, “ I read…. Until every star had disappeared into the ray flight piercing through my window and every shadow and every wounded silence”. The person who gives Diegane his copy of The Labyrinth us Mareme Sign D, a mother figure with irresistible erotic charms. Another exiled Senegalese author, the book’s second part she takes over from the principal narrator to reveal her personal connections to Elimane. The story jumps to late 19th-century Senegal, a French colony suffering from “ the thorn of white civilisation planted in the flesh of our civilisation, with no way to remove it.”

Although the plot of The Labyrinth is barely outlined, yet its power is evident in the character’s reactions. A friend of Diegane who lost his parents in horrific circumstances was a child calls Elimane his saviour, it is The Labyrinth that gives him courage to return to Africa and finally reclaims his past.

The real person behind Sarr’s novel its dedicatee Yambo Ouologuem a Malian who in 1968 won the Prix Renaudot for his debut novel  the mock epic Bound to Violence, before being accused of plagiarism and becoming a recluse. Like The Labyrinth of Inhumanity the book remained neglected for decades, and was recently reissued by Penguin Classics, in Ralph Manheim’s 1971 translation.

Sarr Reimaged Ouologuem’s story, and moves it 30 years closer to the colonial period and adds a plethora of historical material and new situations that better address the main question “ isn’t the whole history of literature one of sweeping plagiarism? Writing, we are reminded, is impossible without borrowing.

The book will remembered for its central theme of identity and authenticity.

The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Nbougar Sarr, translated by Lara Vergnaud, Harvey Secker £20, 496 pages.