Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? [Kindle Edition]

Maryse CONDE (Author), Richard Philcox (Author, Translator)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1995, on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, an infant was found lying in garbage with her throat cut, a crime celebrated author Condé (Tree of Life; Desirada) takes as inspiration for her 12th novel. Like Rushdie and Grass, Condé sets her imaginatively dark epic against the backdrop of a larger conflict, here the clash between imperialist France and the co-opted African continent. Arriving penniless in the turbulent Ivory Coast in 1901, the enigmatic, bewitching Celanire (always wearing a scarf around her neck) embarks on a mission to discover the truth of her violent past. Spanning nine years, the novel follows Celanire as she travels from Africa to her native Guadeloupe and to Peru, where she will exact her final revenge, calling on demons and devils to destroy those who tried to make her a child sacrifice. Condé's prose deftly shifts between lushness and fierceness, but the vengeful Celanire can be unsympathetic. There is not enough insight into her quest—perpetrators are offered up rather than rooted out, making for a mysterious but sometimes lackluster revenge saga—and Celanire herself remains shadowy. While the plot might be a little slack, Condé does an excellent job of weaving together elements of myth, mysticism and history to create an intriguing and often macabre vision of passion and vengeance.
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Review

Joan Dayan, author of Haiti, History, and the Gods With this "fantastical tale," Condé claims her place as the most daring of gothic writers. Enigmatic, obsessive, and fascinating, this novel is the story of a woman goaded to retribution by the scar encircling her neck....[The novel] redefines once and for all what has been called "witchcraft," conjuring it rather as a core belief, a project of thought working itself through terror.

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 423 KB
• Publisher: Atria Books; 1st Atria Books Hardcover Ed edition (August 17, 2004)
• Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
• Language: English
• ASIN: B000NY11WO
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #136,957 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fantastical Tale, April 12, 2007

By 

Chadd Cumberbatch (Montserrat) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding!!, April 2, 2006

By 

Bev Worley "Beverly" (Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?: A Fantastical Tale (Hardcover)

.

I'm on my second reading of this book, and I agree with all the positive statements written in the editorial reviews above.

The book is "Excellent"!!

4.0 out of 5 stars A feminist heroine in French-Caribbean-African Gothic guise, February 16, 2012

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

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.