Summary

In Chapter 8, Lafala receives a letter from the American official. The letter states that a large, well-respected bank has agreed to handle the transfer of the money to Lafala. However, the letter contains no information as to exactly when the transfer will take place. Although Lafala used to feel generally unnerved by the urban life of Marseilles, his newfound fortune has given him feelings of importance and contentment in Marseilles. He even finds himself enjoying jazz music, although he laments that, with his prosthetic limbs, he is no longer agile enough to dance. In the Quayside neighborhood, Lafala frequently visits a bar called Tout-va-Bien, which is French for ‘everything is going well.’ There, he befriends to African-American men named Rock and Diup, who relocated to France to escape America’s more pronounced racism. Rock and Diup try to dissuade Lafala from his goal of...