A Commentary of Alobwed'Epie's The Death Certificate
(Yaounde: Editions CLE,2004, 308 pgs)
PROFESSOR ALOBWED’EPIE’s close to four decades sojourn, in Ngoa-Ekelle, Yaoundé has provided the author with an insider-view, in transmuting, into art form; the folie de grandeur of a twenty-three year clannish, despotism; convulsing, in corruption; on a road to nowhere. Tribalism as a political weapon quickly attracted the ex-seminarians of “The Council of the First Province”.
In responding to a familiar, but specific historical development, the novelist has been compelled to display an increasingly, sharper and engaged focus. Myth and metaphor operating together occasionally achieve aesthetic statements of great compression and resonance. The Death Certificate attests to this effectiveness in employing novelistic art, as an instrument of raising social awareness.
A legitimate question of time and space in fictional works in the realistic mode- the author hangs his literary credo on the critical realist beacon – is, usually, presented in The Death Certificate. The novel is thus necessarily in the expository mode, and the reader cannot fail to notice the satirical author’s calm, deliberate but superbly, effective prose. Alobwed’Epie has extended the range of materials that is usually presented in the bourgeois novel. Plot, characterization, and action are affected in The Death Certificate with terseness and economy. His is the middle style, neither high nor low; a vast, sprawling, almost limitless universe which exhibits throughout an organic unity of style. He therefore demonstrates the instinct of the master novelist; who knows when to vary his style; when to jog along; and when to heighten through the use of the mock-heroic, or the hyperbolic style.
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