The Most Secret Memory of Men

The Most Secret Memory of Men: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Almost every description of The Most Secret Memory of Men (2021) by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (trans by Lara Vergnaud) starts off by telling the reader that Sarr was the first Senegalese/Sub-Saharan African winner of the Prix Goncourt (the most prestigious prize in French literature). Which is very ironic, because The Most Secret Memory of Men is a rallying cry against that sort of thing, while acknowledging and gently raging of his awareness that he’d be subject to exactly that. What makes it so Substackian is the depth of analyses, the way Sarr ties literature to social discourse, the irony, how it traverses genres, and that it’s meta and analytical of writing and literature: it’s a bit of everything and draws inspiration from some of the greatest (non-Western) authors in the canon, including and especially Roberto Bolaño, but also Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Borges, and V.S. Naipaul.

Through the novel’s narrator, Diégane Latyr Faye, Sarr writes about the experience of writing. Through…