I received an electronic ARC of this book via NetGalley.
This is not an easy book to assign a star rating.
It's
beautifully written--the language is poetic, and as the story and
characters shift through time and perspective, the writing itself
reflects this. This is a credit to both Glissant and to translator Betsy
Wing.
The book itself is not always pleasant--but that is part
of the point. The narrative dips back and forth through time, and deals
with themes of slavery, colonization, sexual exploitation, etc. in
Martinique. The shifting narrators and time periods can become somewhat
confusing to the reader, and I think it is this more than anything else
that made this relatively short book take me a fairly long time to
read--that, along with the extended discussion of narrator vs. author
toward the beginning of the novel.
It was worth reading. It would
be worth reading again, with a little more background on Glissant's
other work and the history of Martinique, topics of which I am rather
woefully ignorant. It's the kind of book that I suspect I would enjoy
greatly in a literature class, with the guidance and additional context
such a setting would provide.
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