Two boys, two worlds: the one grows up in the shadow of a Dutch cacao factory, the other works on a cacao plantation in West Africa. They’re shepherded through the 1970s by stevedores, millers, shopkeepers, an itinerant storyteller, a chauffeur, a panther and a crocodile. The one’s life touches the other’s via the aroma of cacao and the whims of the Aztec god of creation Quetzalcoatl and the flower- and song god Xochipilli, who, high above the boys, attempt to reclaim their former glory. Will they succeed in uniting the two young protagonists? The quickest route appears to be via their sacred drink – but cacao, they know, is also as combustible as gunpowder.

The various layers of the story – the boy in North Holland, the boy in West Africa, the commentary of the Aztec gods, the 1970s, the time of ring binders and cassette tapes – intertwine and mirror one another in a series of ostensibly loosely-threaded scenes. They unfurl into a fan of magical stories that, as in an oral narrative, awaken one another with a kiss.

With its scintillating prose, Donald Niedekker’s humorous and moving Cacao shows how myth and reality, past and present, perpetually mirror one other.