When Askia was a child, a combination of famine and drought forced him and his family from their home in Africa and condemned them to a nomadic existence wandering the Sahel desert. Their peripatetic lives leant them the appellation “dirty feet” among villagers who shunned the vagabonds because of their poverty and slovenly appearances.

As an adolescent, Askia’s mother tells him he will not be able to “elude the curse” of wanderlust, the curse that kept his father moving after the family finally settled “in the shabby little town on the outskirts of the big city.” She turns out to be right: as an adult, Askia prowls the nighttime streets of Paris in the taxi he drives. One night, a woman named Olia gets into his cab and claims to recognize him. Olia is a photographer who once shot a man who may be Askia’s long lost father.

This chance meeting provides the dramatic impetus for Edem Awumey’s second novel, which was nominated for France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt. Awumey employs a spare, elliptical storytelling style that heightens the reader’s sense of Askia’s displacement: the villages through which he roams as a child are not described in any detail, and Olia’s portraits of the turbaned man who may be Askia’s father remain frustratingly elusive. The loft in which the man lived, and where he sat for Olia, is festooned with frescoes detailing the history of the Songhai Empire’s king Askia Mohammed. (The name is not a coincidence.) “No one knows who the artist was,” the turbaned man told Olia about the mural. “But the main thing is that it exists.”

The same could be said of Askia, a point that is reflected in the repeated question – “Who are you?” – he imagines reading in the photographer’s expression. The problem is that Olia’s inability to bring Askia into focus is reflected in a similar inability on the part of the reader. By the time the story reaches its violent conclusion – a scene that relies too heavily on an ineffective deus ex machina – the reader doesn’t feel she knows Askia any more clearly than at the story’s outset.

We are told that “Askia did not want to remain a character” like the busker’s puppet Abuneke from his childhood, “a little man made of scraps of cloth.” Yet this is how the novel he inhabits insists on portraying him. This lends the novel an existential aspect reminiscent of Sartre or Camus, but it also keeps us at an aesthetic distance from the main character’s plight. “I find you mysterious,” Olia tells Askia early in the book. “Obscure.” So, in the end, do we.