From Publishers Weekly
Novelist Chamoiseau's second memoir (after School Days) evokes his early childhood, beginning with the rainy night his mother (whom he refers to as the Prime Confidante) walked to the midwife's house to give birth to him, an incident he claims is responsible for his "melancholic weakness for rainy weather." The book is divided into two sections, "Feeling" and "Leaving," both prompted by the author's meditations on his life in Fort-de-France, Martinique. Chamoiseau leads the reader into "the bewitching period" of his childhood, describing it with the doting subjectivity of an older, more mature relative who refers to the child he was as "the little boy." This boy, who was fascinated with torturing insects and rats, found more creative ways to spend his time after a "city storyteller" exposed him to "the astonishing richness of Creole orality," a quality that now animates Chamoiseau's prose in this volume and in such novels as Texaco. Chamoiseau calls the apartment house in which he grew up "old as eternity." It was the center of a world in which "the mamas" washed their clothing in water drawn from a communal fountain and spirits summoned by "people-with-powers" could cause human sickness and otherwise wreak havoc. It was a world of poverty, but his boy's imagination could transform squalor into beauty and meaning. Chamoiseau admits he "sacrifices everything to the music of the phrase," so readers might do well to approach this book as if it were as much fable as memoir.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
paper 0-8032-6382-1 A prequel to Chamoiseaus School Days (1997), this slim, sometimes rambling, sometimes stirringly poignant account covers the novelists (Texaco, 1997, etc.) early childhood between first cognition and education. Writing about himself in the third person as ``the boy,'' Chamoiseau savors the smallest recollected details of Martiniques rich Creole culture. From the limber patois and its incantatory intonations to irrefrangible smells and savory tastes, the island holds a spell over him that is more about the man than the boy. Yet Chamoiseau is too clear-eyed to revel in childhoods lost sensual word. The man knows it is inextricably limned in by amorality, heedless cruelty, and intimations of mortality. There is the annual family pig, much beloved, carefully fed, honored with a name, and which still makes its way to the Christmas table. There is the constant struggle of his mother, Ma Ninotte, to stay out of debt. And when shes deeply in debt to a particular merchant, it is the boy who is sent in her stead to do the shopping. There is the boys holy war, fed by rocks and matches, against insects and rats, which ends when he realizes he cannot kill an aging rat, which he calls the Old Man: ``They [the rats] transformed the little boys nature. Beneath the killer lay the makings of someone who is incapable of doing the slightest harm to the most despicable of the green flies.'' This account does suffer from the problem inherent in most recollections of earliest childhood: once youre past the luxurious tapestry of details and burgeoning awareness, there isnt much else beyond disparate anecdotes. It can and does get boring fast. Chamoiseaus style is an unusual and effective blend of high and low French and Creole, but despite translator Volks best efforts, it doesnt quite come across in English, seeming more precious and affected than original. This autobiographical fragment may not dim Chamoiseaus growing reputation but it wont illuminate it either. --
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