The Most Secret Memory of Men Review: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s Goncourt-Winning Labyrinth Echoing Bolaño’s 2666

There’s a peculiar thrill in spotting a name on a bookshelf that tugs at some half-remembered filament in your mind, like Wittgenstein’s private language suddenly spilling into the public sphere—words that feel yours alone until you realize they’ve been waiting for you all along.

For me, that filament was Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean exile whose sprawling epics I’ve chased like a gambler after a fixed hand.

When I saw The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr available in translation, I knew I’d bite.

Not because of the 2021 Prix Goncourt sticker slapped on the cover, though that helped nudge it from “maybe” to “mine.”

No, it was the whisper of Bolaño in the air, the promise of a narrative that devours its own tail while pretending to be a straight line.

I’ve burned through too many prize-winners that evaporate on contact, their acclaim a marketing sleight-of-hand.

But this one?

It stuck, burrowed, demanded rereads.

And as I’ll unfold, it deserved every ounce of that Goncourt ink.

Yet here’s the rub: Bolaño himself, for all his cultish glow, remains criminally sidelined in the canon.

We lionize the safe giants—Tolstoy’s moral marathons, Mann’s fin-de-siècle fretfulness—while Roberto Bolaño, with his borderland visions and midnight vigils, gets filed under “Latin American oddity.”

It saddens me, this quiet erasure, because Sarr’s book feels like a dispatch from the same fevered geography: literature not as polished monument, but as a frayed map to the uncharted.

Sarr, born in Senegal, channels that undercurrent with a Senegalese pulse, blending Wolof rhythms into French prose like spices into a simmering tagine.

If Bolaño was the bastard son of modernism, Sarr is its postcolonial heir, inheriting the estate and promptly setting fire to the curtains.

I hesitate with contemporaries, you see—writers my generation or thereabouts, products of the same digital deluge that turns every debut into a viral mirage.

Past scorchings linger: the hyped novels that collapse under their own blurbs, echoing Tolstoy’s warning in What Is Art? about sincerity drowned in spectacle.

Marketing’s alchemy is ruthless, transmuting leaden prose into gold-plated tweets.

So when this Goncourt darling surfaced in a bookstore, I paused.

The cover quotes? A parade of heavyweights—Gombrowicz’s grotesque wit, Sabato’s Argentine shadows, Borges’s infinite libraries—but no Bolaño.

Odd, I thought, flipping to the epigraph from The Savage Detectives, that Bolaño fever dream of vanished poets and endless pursuits.

Why invoke the detectives but not the desert of 2666?

That omission nagged, a loose thread I’d pull until the whole fabric unraveled.

And the reviews?

Predictable as a metronome.

Le Monde and L’Express served up the usual froth: “A triumphant mosaic!” “An ode to forgotten voices!”

Even Libération, which edged closer to the bone, couldn’t shake the clichés—phrases like “literary resurrection” that sound profound until you realize they’re just synonyms for “it’s good.”

Diégane, Sarr’s narrator, anticipates this very fatigue in the text, mocking the critics who nibble at edges while the abyss yawns. It’s meta from the jump, a wink that says:

You’re already complicit. One fear gnawed at me before cracking the spine—I’ll circle back to it, because it slithered in uninvited, turning admiration into something sharper.

But first, let’s map the terrain.

Unraveling the Quest: A Swift Summary

In The Most Secret Memory of Men, Diégane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer scraping by in Paris, stumbles upon a yellowed tome in a cluttered bookshop:

Le Labyrinthe de l’Unhymne, penned by one T.C. Elimane in the 1930s.

This elusive novel, once hailed as a modernist marvel, was swiftly buried under accusations of plagiarism—passages lifted wholesale from European masters, or so the scandal screamed.

Diégane, haunted by his own stalled ambitions and a fraying affair, fixates on Elimane, chasing ghosts across continents: from Dakar’s sun-baked alleys to labyrinthine archives, from Nazi-occupied Paris to the blood-soaked fields of colonial Africa.

What begins as literary detective work spirals into a confrontation with erasure—personal, cultural, historical.

Elimane isn’t just a phantom author; he’s a mirror to Diégane’s voids, his manuscript a palimpsest of stolen lives and unspoken horrors.

Sarr weaves diaries, letters, and fevered confessions into a tapestry that blurs fact and forgery, forcing us to question:

What secrets does memory hoard, and at what cost do we unearth them?

By the end, Diégane returns to Senegal not with answers, but with a heavier burden—one that binds the intimate ache of creation to the colossal weight of forgotten wars.

It’s a plot that hums with restraint, never rushing its revelations, much like Freud’s talking cure: layers peeled slowly, each exposing nerves raw and quivering.

But does it deliver on that Bolañean sprawl I craved, or does it tidy itself into French elegance?

Pulses and Torrents: The Slow Seduction

It opens unremarkably, a pulse more than a thunderclap—echoing Salieri’s lament in Amadeus, that flicker of genius glimpsed but not grasped.

Diégane’s Paris is a fog of mediocrity: grant applications rejected, lovers drifting like cigarette smoke.

Nothing special, I thought, turning pages with the wariness of a man testing thin ice.

However Sarr knows his craft; he dangles just enough intrigue—a cryptic dedication, a bookseller’s hushed urgency—to hook you.

Before long, you’re knee-deep in the torrent, the “basic” prologue a feint that gives way to narrative eddies pulling you under.

What elevates it?

Not fireworks, but friction—the quiet grind of doubt against discovery.

Diégane’s voice, wry and wounded, recalls Bolaño’s Arturo Belano: both outsiders sniffing at literature’s underbelly, where glory curdles into grudge.

I found myself nodding at lines that captured that grind, the way ambition chafes like ill-fitted shoes on a long march.

And then, midway through, a shift: the context blooms, not dumped in exposition but unfurled like a sail catching wind.

Suddenly, you’re not just reading a quest; you’re inhabiting its folds.

But how does Sarr conjure worlds without dangling a wand—without, that is, resorting to the lazy diorama of backstory?

Contexts Woven, Not Spun: Sarr’s Narrative Alchemy

Sarr’s genius lies in contextual conjuring, a sleight where history seeps into character like ink into rice paper.

Elimane’s tale doesn’t arrive via info-dumps; it emerges through Diégane’s fumbling inquiries, each clue a shard that reassembles the mosaic.

We learn of Elimane’s youth in interwar Senegal not through lectures, but via a faded photograph’s crease, a colonist’s offhand slur overheard in a café.

It’s organic, inevitable—much like Wittgenstein’s language games, where meaning arises not from isolated words but their play in conversation.

Sarr plays that game masterfully, letting Wolof proverbs clash with Proustian introspection, colonial edicts bleed into jazz riffs from a Montmartre club.

This isn’t mere backdrop; it’s the story’s sinew.

As Diégane pores over Elimane’s plagiarized passages—snippets echoing Conrad or Céline—they morph from thefts into testimonies, refracting the violence of empire through a stolen lens.

I was reminded of Jung’s collective unconscious here, those archetypes bubbling up unbidden: the quester, the outcast, the forger as truth-teller.

Sarr doesn’t belabor it; he trusts the weave to speak. And speak it does, drawing you deeper into a Europe that’s less Enlightenment beacon than charnel house, a Africa less exotic prop than furious pulse.

For all this immersion, a shadow lingers: is this love letter to literature, as some claim, or something thornier?

Something that bares its teeth when you lean in too close?

The Brutal Paramour: Literature’s Unflinching Gaze

They call it Sarr’s amour fou for books, and sure, there’s devotion in every page—the reverence for ink-stained hands, for stories that outlive their tellers.

But love, as any scarred heart knows, is no gentle suitor.

Sarr portrays literature’s promiscuity with unflagging candor: its bed-hopping with power, its dalliances with deceit.

Elimane doesn’t worship the canon; he ravages it, lifting phrases like a thief in the night, not out of laziness but desperation—a colonized voice screaming through borrowed throats.

It’s promiscuous, yes, but promiscuous with purpose, echoing Bataille’s erotic excess where transgression births revelation.

And oh, the brutality.

Sarr spares no flinch: publishing houses as colonial outposts, critics as inquisitors in tweed.

Diégane’s Paris exile mirrors this—grants doled out like alms to the “exotic,” his Senegalese roots a curiosity until they chafe.

It’s a portrait that stings because it’s true, stripping the romance from “world literature” to reveal its barbed wire.

The author loves it all, the rot included, much like one loves a flawed lover: not despite the scars, but through them.

This duality hooked me, turning passive reading into active reckoning.

But what of the larger canvas—those tragedies that Sarr threads through the personal, making the intimate echo the immense?

How does he balance the featherweight of one man’s doubt against history’s anvil?

Fractured Spaces, Eternal Wounds: Tragedies in Tandem

Time folds in Sarr’s hands like origami, origami stained with blood.

The novel’s tragedies—personal fractures, the Holocaust’s mechanized maw, the colonial wars’ festering sores—unfurl in shared spaces, multiple epochs colliding like tectonic plates.

The Dakar homecoming overlaps with Elimane’s wartime fugue; a plaza whispers of Franco’s ghosts and French deportations.

It’s not parallelism for show; it’s a philosophical insistence, à la Bergson, that duration binds us—past bleeding into present, unhealed.

Sarr sidesteps the PC varnish with a surgeon’s blade, presenting horrors as they are: shitty, soul-crushing, beyond the mind’s frail scaffolding.

No sanitized “lessons learned”; just the raw sewage of human folly.

Politics?

A farce of tin-pot messiahs, revolutions devouring their children like Cronus his brood.

Sarr’s view aligns with mine: these machinations are distractions from the mystical undercurrents—the animist whispers in Senegalese soil, the Kabbalistic riddles in Elimane’s margins.

He evokes Lévinas here, that ethical call from the other’s face, but twists it: the other’s face is charred, ignored, yet it demands we look.

The gut-punch passages?

Elimane’s letter to his mother and mystic uncle, interleaved with his father’s missive from the Great War trenches—a palimpsest of paternal pleas amid atrocity.

The elder Horep’s words, scrawled in mustard-gas haze: “The mud tastes of iron, boy, and the screams are a language older than French.”

Cut to Elimane’s own dispatch from Vichy France, where yellow stars bloom on Jewish neighbors’ coats like poisonous fungi: “I forge their papers with ink from my veins, but the ovens laugh at signatures.”

It’s unbearable, this nesting of griefs—WW1’s meat-grinder birthing WW2’s inferno, colonial rifles echoing in both.

Another scorcher: Diégane unearthing Elimane’s African notebook, pages smeared with accounts of Thiaroye massacre survivors, Senegalese tirailleurs bayoneted by their “liberators” in 1944.

These aren’t flourishes; they’re detonations, forcing comprehension’s collapse.

Sarr doesn’t preach; he immerses, leaving you sodden with the weight.

But amid this deluge, my pre-read fear crept in—unbidden, like a draft in a sealed room.

What if the mysticism tipped into cliché, the African “magic” a reductive trope?

The Intrusion of Doubt: When Fears Take Root

That fear?

The exoticism trap—the risk of Senegalese mysticism devolving into National Geographic kitsch, gri-gri amulets and ancestral spirits as set dressing for Western palates.

I’ve wearied of it in lesser works, where “otherness” serves as spice, not soul.

Sarr flirts with it: Elimane as black Samson, wielding ancient rites to smite foes, his aura crackling with leopards’ eyes in the dark.

Yet he subverts, grounding the supernatural in psychological soil—Freud’s uncanny, where the familiar warps into dread. Elimane’s “powers” aren’t plot coupons; they’re trauma’s afterimage,

hallucinations born of mother’s murder in a colonial raid.

The fear lodged, then dissolved: Sarr alchemizes it into authenticity, Wolof lore as lived lexicon, not prop.

This pivot deepened my investment, turning suspicion to sympathy.

But the quest’s core—the hunt for Elimane—mirrors a specter from my Bolaño obsessions.

How close does Sarr hew to that 2666 blueprint, and does it illuminate or imitate?

Myth-Makers and Vanishings: Archimboldi Meets Elimane

At heart, The Most Secret Memory of Men is a paean to the phantom author, Diégane’s odyssey for Elimane shadowing the critics’ fruitless stalk of Benno von Archimboldi in Bolaño’s 2666.

Both are spectral hunts: elusive Teutonic titan versus Senegalese scribe, their trails littered with red herrings and ravaged lives. Biographic echoes abound—Archimboldi’s father, a WWI doughboy gassed at the Somme;

Elimane’s, a Senegalese infantryman dodging bayonets in the same mud. WW2 scars both progeny: Archimboldi fleeing Nazis through shadowed Europe, Elimane dodging Gestapo roundups while forging passports in Paris attics.

Even the plagiarism charge parallels Archimboldi’s rumored borrowings, a meta-jab at originality’s myth.

Sarr amplifies this with African inflection—Elimane’s “Theft” not laziness, but resistance, colonized words reclaimed as reparations.

It’s a dialogue across oceans: Bolaño’s Mexican borderlands meet Senegal’s Sahel, both liminal zones where identity frays.

Sarr diverges, infusing hope’s glint: Elimane’s manuscript, unlike Archimboldi’s unfinished opus, surfaces, if mangled.

This quest isn’t nihilism’s loop; it’s a spiral toward reckoning. But peel back the homage, and what’s left? A metatextual funhouse where Sarr’s irony dances with giants.

Related Article: Dive deeper into Bolaño’s enigmatic sprawl with my review of 2666 by Roberto Bolaño—where deserts swallow secrets much like Sarr’s labyrinths.

Labyrinths of the Unhymne: Metatextual Mirrors

Enter Le Labyrinthe de l’Unhymne, Elimane’s magnum opus within the opus—a Borgesian hall of mirrors where text devours text.

Sarr’s metatextual argument thrives here: irony laced with intellect, Bolaño’s procedural sprawl fused with Senegalese griot traditions.

Dostoevskian parables abound—Elimane as Raskolnikov, guilt-haunted by “crimes” of creation; Diégane as Alyosha, seeking elder wisdom in profane scrolls.

Kafka’s bureaucracies haunt the archives, endless forms denying access to truth.

Borges? Everywhere—the infinite library as Elimane’s mind, forking paths of fiction and fact.

Huxley’s Point Counter Point wit sharpens the satire: rival writers as polyphonic snipers, each voice a barb.

Sarr sprinkles more: Conrad’s heart-of-darkness inversions, where Europe’s “civilizers” are the true marauders; Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence, that Malian precursor to Elimane’s scandals.

Even Wittgenstein slips in, via Diégane’s musings on “naming” atrocities—language’s limits when words fail the furnace.

From Sarr’s Senegalese roots spring Sufi riddles and animist loops, twining with these Western threads into a hybrid beast.

It’s no collage; it’s synthesis, a postcolonial remix that sparks like flint on steel.

The irony?

Sarr mocks the very game he’s playing, Diégane quipping that all writing is plagiarism from the void.

This labyrinth doesn’t trap; it liberates, inviting us to wander our own fictions.

But amid the dazzle, does Elimane emerge as god or fool—superhuman seer or shattered man?

The Man Beneath the Myth: Elimane’s Quiet Cracks

For all the hocus-pocus—Elimane summoning sandstorms via gri-gri chants, toppling oppressors like a vengeful Anansi—he’s achingly human, hubris his Achilles’ heel.

His art, misunderstood as mere mimicry, festers like an unbandaged wound; critics’ barbs echo in his diaries as self-lacerations.

“I built cathedrals from their bricks,” he writes, “and they call it squatting.”

Worse, his psyche splinters on maternal memory: her lynching by colonial overseers, a primal scene Freud would dissect as neurosis’s seed.

Sarr renders this not as backstory bombast, but fragmented flashes—her laughter in a mango grove, then screams under rifle butts—trauma as unreliable narrator.

It’s this frailty that endears, humanizing the mystic. Elimane isn’t Samson unchained; he’s Samson sightless, groping for meaning in Philistine rubble.

Psychology buffs might nod to Bowlby’s attachment theory: that severed bond propels his forgeries, a bid to rewrite loss.

Literature lovers? It’s pure Dostoevsky, the underground man raging against incomprehension.

Sarr balances it deftly, mysticism as coping scaffold, not crutch.

In the end, Elimane’s not superhuman; he’s us—flawed forgers chasing the ineffable. Which begs: in a world of such tender ferocity, how to score the whole?

Echoes Lingering: A 4.5-Star Reckoning

The Most Secret Memory of Men exceeded, not by miles but by fathoms—Sarr delivering a Goncourt worthy of its weight, a Bolaño heir that honors without aping.

It’s intellectually supple yet accessibly raw, personal in its pricks, engaging like a late-night debate that veers philosophical.

Flaws?

A few threads dangle—Diégane’s romance feels sketched—but they don’t unravel the weave.

4.5 stars: deduct half for the fear it briefly stoked, award the rest for banishing it.

Read it if you hunger for literature that bites back, that maps the unsayable without Wittgenstein’s silence. It’ll linger, a secret memory of your own.

Related Article: For more magic-tinged African tales, check my review of Under the Frangipani by Mia Couto—ghosts and colonial scars in Mozambican ink.