Review by Booklist Review
Francis Sancher is the mysterious, handsome stranger on the island of Guadeloupe. He is loud and boisterous, talks in riddles, and speaks openly about his impending death. Some of the island's residents love him, others hate or fear him, but everyone has an opinion. Thus, no one is surprised when he is found face down in the mud, dead without any visible cause of death. As the islanders gather for his funeral, their internal monologues and declamations over the corpse each contribute to the picture the reader forms of Sancher. Was he a Cuban revolutionary, fighting beside Castro until he grew weary of the bloodshed? Or was he a doctor who aided the victims of the war in Angola? Was he, as some whisper, an escaped murderer? He has not helped his reputation by impregnating two young women, nor by befriending the island's outcasts, but appropriately, Cond leaves the final judgments to the reader. Despite a fairly clumsy translation, which often uses footnotes instead of conveying the meaning of unfamiliar terms within the context of the story, this atmospheric novel is quite powerful. --George Needham
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
``Perhaps we should weed out from our heads the Guinea grass and quitch grass of our old grudges. Perhaps we should teach our hearts a new beat,'' muses the clairvoyant Mama Sonson as she joins in the curious wake for Francis Sancher, a stranger who died while visiting the French island of Guadeloupe. All the people attending ponder his identity and also his effect on their lives. Was he a writer? Drug dealer? Doctor? Cuban? One thing is certain: Sancher, a handsome mulatto on an island besieged by concerns over skin color, turns everyone's hatreds and passions inside out. Economic woes (dependable sugarcane, sweet relic, has been replaced by banana plantations); political woes (``the torpor of this sterile land that has never managed to produce a revolution''); ethnic woes (French French are viewed as bourgeois buffoons and immigrant Haitians as louts); personal woes (bad marriages, incestuous affairs, unloved children, genetic ailment and tragedy have left no family unscathed): All such recriminations find their way into a wake for a man who has left two town daughters pregnant and whose personal creed was touched more by love than by hatred. Readers will find a range of bitter sadness in Condé's (Segu) vision, and at the same time, they will delight in her descriptions of the ``desecrated cathedral'' of a forest or the ``rough fondling'' of a swimming hole. Condé's unconventional narrative, in which disparate voices take turns mourning or celebrating Sancher, paradoxically risks seeming formulaic, and many of her transitions are self-consciously abrupt, but this rich web of lives has a lush, trembling beauty that seems nearly ready, by the end of the wake, to heed Mama Sonson's desperately needed advice. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
No one knows where Francis Sancher came from, but when the mysterious doctor dies, all of Rivière au Sel attends his wake. The people of this Guadeloupean villagefriends, teachers, lovers, and enemiesrecount the rumors, family conflicts, and superstitions that focused on this stranger, and in so doing reveal the wider history of their island culture. Conde, the author of I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (LJ 7/92), vividly evokes the complexities of a color caste system pitting Indians against Haitians as well as Creoles against "French French" in a struggle for power and status. A lively translation, liberally spiced with Creole expressions, plunges the reader into this exotic world where secrets well up like springs in the rain forest, and one person's death brings new life to many others. Recommended for special collections as well as general readers.Paul E. Hutchison, Bellefonte, Pa. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A drifting, evocative story about a mystery man who brings unsettling change to a village in Guadeloupe. Condé (Tree of Life, 1992, etc.) begins with the death of the handsome stranger, Francis Sancher, who has in his short time in Rivière au Sel created fierce loyalties and even fiercer enmities among the villagers. At his night-long wake, the people he touched convene around the body as each in turn considers his or her relationship with the dead man: Moïse, the half-black, half-Chinese postman who attaches himself to Francis when he first arrives--so much so that the townsfolk believe they are homosexuals--but is then spurned; Mira, the beautiful, light-skinned woman who gives birth to Francis's child; Vilma, the young Indian woman who is impregnated by Francis and wishes she could burn on his pyre as her grandmothers would have done; Vilma's parents; Mira's stepmother; and the rest of the villagers. Through their brief reminiscences, the reader gets a sense of the petty, xenophobic community and a look (albeit superficial) into the minds of the its inhabitants. The glimpses of the dead Francis, however, provide few clues to the mystery. He believed he was cursed, like all his male relatives, to die suddenly around the age of 50; his family was originally from Guadeloupe, the birthplace of the curse; he had traveled a great deal; he had money but took no pleasure from it. Francis makes few real attachments in the community--even his affairs with Mira and Vilma are virtually one-night stands--because of his imminent death, which he waits and watches for almost eagerly. In the end, we are forced to accept that we will never know the whole truth of the story. The mystery of the man and his demise remain unsolved. Accomplished but insubstantial: Like Francis himself, the novel briefly alights and is soon gone.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
