- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Anchor; 1st Edition edition (Feb 1 1995)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0385476337
- ISBN-13: 978-0385476331
- Product Dimensions: 13.8 x 1.5 x 20.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 222 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #205,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
"Perhaps we should weed out from our heads the Guinea grass and quitch grass of our old grudges. Perhaps we should teach our hearts a new beat," muses the clairvoyant Mama Sonson as she joins in the curious wake for Francis Sancher, a stranger who died while visiting the French island of Guadeloupe. All the people attending ponder his identity and also his effect on their lives. Was he a writer? Drug dealer? Doctor? Cuban? One thing is certain: Sancher, a handsome mulatto on an island besieged by concerns over skin color, turns everyone's hatreds and passions inside out. Economic woes (dependable sugarcane, sweet relic, has been replaced by banana plantations); political woes ("the torpor of this sterile land that has never managed to produce a revolution"); ethnic woes (French French are viewed as bourgeois buffoons and immigrant Haitians as louts); personal woes (bad marriages, incestuous affairs, unloved children, genetic ailment and tragedy have left no family unscathed): All such recriminations find their way into a wake for a man who has left two town daughters pregnant and whose personal creed was touched more by love than by hatred. Readers will find a range of bitter sadness in Conde's (Segu) vision, and at the same time, they will delight in her descriptions of the "desecrated cathedral" of a forest or the "rough fondling" of a swimming hole. Conde's unconventional narrative, in which disparate voices take turns mourning or celebrating Sancher, paradoxically risks seeming formulaic, and many of her transitions are self-consciously abrupt, but this rich web of lives has a lush, trembling beauty that seems nearly ready, by the end of the wake, to heed Mama Sonson's desperately needed advice.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
No one knows where Francis Sancher came from, but when the mysterious doctor dies, all of Riviere au Sel attends his wake. The people of this Guadeloupean village?friends, teachers, lovers, and enemies?recount the rumors, family conflicts, and superstitions that focused on this stranger, and in so doing reveal the wider history of their island culture. Conde, the author of I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (LJ 7/92), vividly evokes the complexities of a color caste system pitting Indians against Haitians as well as Creoles against "French French" in a struggle for power and status. A lively translation, liberally spiced with Creole expressions, plunges the reader into this exotic world where secrets well up like springs in the rain forest, and one person's death brings new life to many others. Recommended for special collections as well as general readers.?Paul E. Hutchison, Bellefonte, Pa.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Conde: The Classic Literary Maroon,
By Alan Cambeira "author of Azucar's Trilogy" (Dominican Republic, author of Tattered Paradise...Azucar's Trilogy Ends) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Crossing the Mangrove (Paperback)
The reader must not readily assume (quite a mistake) that this is a conventional detective mystery, even one with Caribbean cadences. Far from being so. Rather, this is an exhilarating celebration of the intricate balancing of the complexities of cultural diversity in the region. Without equal, Conde is both brilliant and powerful in presenting an honest portrait of Caribbean society, most particularly the richness of the Guadeloupean society. The murdered stranger, Francis Sancher, is symbolic of the long history of the Caribbean itself: the influential, intrusive "outsider" that serves as catalyst for change. But be careful; Sancher is not the central character here. If one reads all of Conde's novels together (an experience well worth the time), one observes a fascinating personal evolution in setting, form, artistry, and content: from Africa, the United States and the anglophone Antilles, then finally to the francophone zone. This geographical movement parallels precisely the author's emotional/psychological journey back to her native Guadeloupe. Conde is the classic literary maroon, so central, in my opinion, to the Caribbean literary tradition: while promoting independence for others, she simultaneously claims it for herself. She, by the way, is a longtime supporter of independence from France of the entire francophone territories. As a writer, Conde definitely heads the list of the region's most stellar and talented. All her novels are MUST READ works.Alan Cambeira, Author of AZUCAR! The Story of Sugar (a novel)
3.0 out of 5 stars
Differing points of view,
By
This review is from: Crossing the Mangrove (Paperback)
The last book assigned in my African-American Women's Literature course actually goes a little off the coast to look at a Guadalopean writer who now makes her home in the U.S. but writes about her island birthplace in her native French and Creole. This novel is her most recent, a study it seems of a community on the island and the changes brought about by an outsider.The outsider, Frances Sancher, dies in Chapter One, and most readers will likely expect a mystery here, in which an explanation for his death is revealed in the end. And it is true enough that Frances is a mysterious character, especially as seen through the many different eyes of the community, but Conde is not writing a detective story--or, at least, not a traditional one. Even though Frances seems to be a catalyst for change in the community, he is not the center of the novel, even though his physical body in its casket serves as the candle to which the moths are drawn. Like the candle, Frances' life and death illuminates the other characters, sometimes singeing one or two, but when the candle burns out, the moths are free to move on and return to what they were doing before the candle arrived. I really liked the structure of this novel, as each chapter is told from a new point of view (nearly 20 different in all). I realize that this is nothing new--William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and other novels have used a similar scheme--but this was the first time I had run into it. But I'm just not sure the novel works for me in the end, unless Conde's purpose was to portray Guadalopean society as fractured and diverse. This definitely comes through, but works against the Western tradition of cohesiveness in the novel. The ending here is not Aristotelian; instead, it implies a multitude of beginnings. It's not that I feel I have to have all the threads tied up by the end of a novel, but I would like to get some sense of completion, some sense that there was a reason why the author selected these moments in time as compared to some other. Novels are about narrative, not simply description.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Impressive! It's Everything that you'd expect and more!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Crossing the Mangrove (Paperback)
I hate reviews of books because you either get a lame overstatement or a careless understatement. Most the reviews that I've read on this book speaks of a mysterious death that leads to an investigative story--- and the investigative assumption makes readers like me completely skip books of the nature.BUT THIS BOOK HAS A STEW SO THICK IN CULTURE and COLOR SCENERY that it encaptures you so that shortly you'll realize that the book is over. Every character has an interesting story. I love this book and I plan to read more of Conde's novels. It's a journey in past times and current times, cultures varying from Negro, Mulatto, East Indian, French/Creole Carribean as well Spanish Carribiean and Americas..You'll love it.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
Most recent customer reviews |
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
