Savane Mulet is the nominal landscape of this stream-of-consciousness-influenced novel that inhabits a dreamscape more than any particular town on Guadeloupe in the West Indies, where the great 1928 cyclone traumatized Eliette, then eight. Now Hurricane Hugo, whose force and violence unlock repressed memories of grief and loss, bookends Eliette's life. In the interim, a Haitian woman prophesied a girl child for Eliette, but pregnancy never was part of her life, though she so yearned for a child that she broke with her first husband and married a 50-year-old docker who, sadly, proved "inoperative in action" and then died, leaving her doubly embittered, alone in her cabin. Then in Eliette's tropical world of superstition, passions, and forces of nature, energies interlock when the golden jewelry of a woman named Esabelle seemingly brings a heaviness into the air that cracks the sky and leads to murder. Pineau's liquid flow of images, chronological leaps, and varied points of view add up to a treasurable experience for those who stay with it.
Whitney ScottCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Review
"An important series of contemporary Jewish writing abroad translated into English."—Library Journal
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Library Journal )
"The motif of silence that runs through many of the pieces is in keeping with the paradoxical nature of the book: the writers do after all speak, mute of the spoken but not of the written word. The translations are uniformly lucid and graceful, and the lengthy introduction provides a valuable frame to the book."—Choice
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Choice )
"For the non-Polish reader, the superb introduction alone makes the book worthwhile. The editors, Brandeis professor Antony Polonsky and University of Lublin professor Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, have included a number of Polish Jewish writers who wrote in Polish and dealt with Jewish topics. Although several writers, including Ida Fink, left Poland, most stayed. Some, such as Stryjkowski and Adolph Rudnicki, had begun to write before the war. Like Ms. Krall and Michal Grynberg, others were children or adolescents during the Holocaust. All these writers take a hard and realistic look at Polish-Jewish relations during the war and give readers vital insight into the psychological dilemma of being a Jew in postwar Poland."—Forward
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Forward )
