The Explosion of the Radiator Hose

The Explosion of the Radiator Hose is actually the second book I’ve read about an ill-fated attempt to move a car across Africa. In Malaria Dreams, Stuart Stevens and a former fashion model drive a Land Rover from the Central African Republic northward to Europe. In this book, the narrator, who if we follow Proust and “give the narrator the same name as the author of this book” we may call Jean Rolin, sets out to drive an Audi from France to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The book is well reviewed by Emma Garman at Words Without Borders (where I blog from time to time). My only quibble with her review is that she describes it as “ostensibly a travelogue that I assume has been partially fictionalized/embellished.” In fact (at least in its English edition) it appears under the marketing-friendly rubic “a novel.” But as you read it, it is impossible not to conclude that it is mostly a travelogue or memoir.

I expected Explosion to be entertaining but a little shallow, as so many road books are. The first line promises comic disasters: “When the radiator hose burst, the car had done exactly nine-nine thousand four hundred meters, since its odometer was reset to zero.”

Rolin’s reaction to this setback makes you suspect at once that he doesn’t know much about the Congo. Rather than finding some duct tape and sheet metal (or better yet, having brought some with him) he sends his partner Patrice to a nearby village to look for an Audi dealership. Not surprisingly, Patrice doesn’t find one.

First impressions are deceptive in this case. Rolin knows his Proust and his W.G. Sebald (an essential guide to the boundary of fact and fiction), and he spent much of his youth in the Congo. Peppered throughout this little book of 162 pages are asides that convey more knowledge of Central Africa than you will find in some authors’ entire tomes. Stranded in his car as night falls, page 12 finds him worrying about what will happen to him, but in a world-historical context.

Among the images of torture and humiliation that now presented themselves for my consideration, one stood out from all the others, for its detail and historical importance alike. The scene is from the personal Calvary of Patrice Lumumba, the ephemeral president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the months immediately following its birth: of all the heroes of African independence, Lumumba is arguably the only one to have retained his heroic status, as much for the circumstances of his demise as for the brevity of his reign (slightly less than three months), even though the latter bore the stain of a handful of massacres carried out under his authority, mostly against members of the Luba tribe, in the province of Kasai.

Here in a single sentence we get not only a quick précis of the career of Patrice Lumumba but a more evenhanded one than you will find in some full-length works.