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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fantastical Tale, April 12, 2007
This review is from: Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?: A Fantastical Tale (Paperback)
I got this book as a gift; it looked at me from a corner for about six weeks. I finally gave in and picked it up...what a ride!
Read this book and be transported. The writer lures you into a fantastical tale, into a world that is truly beleiavable;Characters so carefully drawn you can smell them. I will be reading more of Maryse Conde.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
A feminist heroine in French-Caribbean-African Gothic guise, February 16, 2012
This review is from: Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?: A Fantastical Tale (Paperback)
If there's a reason that Maryse Conde hasn't become more universally read (her earlier novel, "Crossing the Mangrove," is impeccable), it could be because she is not shy about creating a lead character many readers might, at best, feel ambivalent towards. Such a woman is Celanire, who overcomes a horrific trauma to become a seemingly fearsome priestess of dark magic, "a kaleidoscope of negative facets, . . . the `horse' of an evil spirit who had brought nothing but death, mourning, and desolation." Conde's heroine is hauntingly disturbing, but the portrayal seems conflicted (in the good sense of the word) yet indistinct (in an unsatisfactory way).
At first, Celanire seems worthy of compassion and admiration. As a child on the island of Guadeloupe in the 1880s, she is left for dead, her throat slashed. She is rescued by a doctor, taught by nuns in France, and travels to the Ivory Coast, where she arrives at an academy for illegitimate children whose director has just died; as interim director, she transforms the school into a regional beacon of hope and respect. She campaigns against female circumcision and for women's rights in general. She is bewitchingly beautiful, always covering the wound on her elegant neck with a scarf.
And yet: she is aloof towards friends and lovers alike. Those close to her fall victim to a series of tragedies: apparent suicides, violent attacks by animals, drowning, imprisonment--whatever it seems to take to get them out of her way. The academy she has so famously improved hides in plain sight a scandalous means to raise money for its boarders. It becomes clear that nothing will be allowed to impede Celanire's twin goals: to avenge her childhood attackers and to find out the identity of her parents.
A few chapters into "Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?" things turns appreciably darker, when an important secret about her attack and miraculous recovery is revealed. Some readers might guess what's coming, but since it took me completely by surprise, I won't reveal this plot element. Suffice it to say that the book adopts an almost Gothic tone, and Conde releases into her plot the magic and superstition that govern the lives of her African and Caribbean characters, with hints of human sacrifice, voodoo, demonic possession, and shape-shifting.
Undergirding this revenge story is the friction between the local populations and their colonial administrators. It's only here that Conde gets a little heavy-handed in her tone--although certainly no reader would claim that she divides her sympathies simplistically, between good and evil, black and white, women and men, natives and French. Celanire uses this tension to her advantage: "She had given a lot of thought to the reasons why relations between Africans and the French came up against a stumbling block. Because the colonizers, being men, could only think in terms of men." Through her realization that "only the women could hold colonization in check," she arrives at--and justifies--solutions that are, shall we say, unorthodox. Following the same prescription for herself, she becomes the wife of a colonial governor, an act that will lead ultimately and surprisingly to a compromised liberation.
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