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28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Arise and Weep, August 4, 2004
This is the kind of book that can make you seem obsessed. Once you enter Bell's world, you're disturbed, excited, and depressed, but you can't stop talking about the book you're in. It's like having a secret that's too heavy to really divulge, but you keep alluding to parts of it, as if you were talking in code. People look at you like you're sort of cracked, but generally they think it will pass. The blood-soaked history of Haiti is cause for despair, but the revolutionary spirit of the 1790's makes you hope in spite of what you know. Toussaint is one of the great heroes of all time, and Bell makes him both human and epic. In this book, you don't develop much emotional connection to him -- that's the province of more fictional characters like Doctor Hebert and Riau -- but you care immensely about his success as a leader. You want him to be as great, as visionary, as Martin Luther King, but he belongs to a different era, a violent one. The backdrop of the French Revolution, with its mixture of rights and terror, is essential to the drama of All Souls' Rising, and most readers will need to read the appendix several times to stay abreast of royalists, Jacobins, and emissaries from the Mother Country. Some knowledge of American history might help --Jefferson, for instance, opposed the Haitian slave revolt because he feared something similar in the US which would deprive him of slaves plus the boost he got from the 3/5 compromise which gave white planters more votes, while Adams and Pickering favored emancipation and liberation -- but you can follow the essential plot without historical annotation. It's the kind of gravy that lifts the book to a higher level, but readers looking for love, betrayal, courage, devotion, cruelty, sex, and perverse logic will be sated. Contemporary maps won't help with many of the locations, but Bell has a map in the second volume of the trilogy, Master of the Crossroads, that helped me get a sense of place. The themes and the style of the book are managed with power and grace. Bell's a hell of a writer, and I believed each of the voices in the narrative. Big books like this sweep you up and carry you away, but this book sweeps the reader into a present time of continuous revolution in Haiti, slaughter in Sudan, disease and unending horror in much of Africa, war in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. The blood drama of Bell's Haiti gives us a red filter for understanding our own time. At the end of the book, I'm thrilled by the revolutionary possibilities, depressed by the inevitable destruction and failure, and grateful for every moment of compassion and kindness however small. I can't wait to read the next volume.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Ominous, powerful, and exotic, December 25, 2001
By A Customer
This story of the Haitian revolution is violent and disturbing, but its violence is handled with care and placed in the context of each character's psychology and motivations. The characters are believable, the history seems painstakingly accurate, and the sensory descriptions are rich and vivid. The book leaves you with new, unresolved questions about what race is -- a topic which obsesses many of the characters in the book as well. An unforgettable read and an important one.
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21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
comprehensible and worthwhile, April 1, 2001
I found this an extremely difficult read: I was 16, knew nothing about Haiti's history, and spoke no French. I took nearly three months to finish reading the book, because every so often I had to take a break from the horrific violence Bell portrays. In the end, however, this novel remains one of the most impressive I have ever read, in terms of the way it really made me think. The depths of terror and violence to which Bell's characters resorted shocked me. But I did not lose sight of the novel's bigger picture. Ultimately, I have little sympathy for the book's reviewers who could not see past the novel's violence and complexity. Five tries to get through the book? Try a Dick and Jane reader, then, and come back in a few years.
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