Debut novel wins top prize for peer-juried fiction in US
IMBOLO MBUE has won the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award for her debut novel, Behold the Dream
ers, about an immigrant desperate to become a US citizen.
The $15 000 (R206 000) award, announced on Tuesday by chairperson Susan Richards Shreve, is “America’s largest peer-juried prize for fiction”.
Behold the Dreamers is a strikingly timely story about Jende Jonga, a man from Cameroon who hopes to settle his family permanently in the US. In the opening pages, a Lehman Brothers executive in New York hires Jende to be his chauffeur. Their relationship allows the novel to follow the trajectories of two very different families at opposite ends of America’s economic ladder when the Great Recession hits.
Jende’s tale is informed, in some ways, by Mbue’s life. After a childhood of extreme poverty in Cameroon, relatives sponsored her to come to the US in 1998. She went to college and graduate school and settled in New York; she became a citizen in 2014.
Her novel reportedly sold to Random House for at least $1 million. She knows both the immigrant’s boundless optimism and America’s conflicted attitude toward foreigners.
“I am an example of what America offers to immigrants,” Mbue said last year. “We come here in awe – in awe – and wanting to be a part of it.”
But Behold the Dreamers demonstrates how heartbreaking the process of becoming a citizen can be for many.
“This story was influenced by people I’ve met who are trying to get papers, trying to become citizens. It is something that pretty much every immigrant dreams of.”
Mbue will receive her award on May 6 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. Finalists are: ● Viet Dinh, After Disasters ● Louise Erdrich, LaRose ● Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You ● Sunil Yapa, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist. – Washington Post