Texaco (French Edition)

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School Days

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Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau has long been a proponent of "Creolity," a literary movement that seeks to preserve the character of Creole language and culture against the threat of assimilation into French ways of speaking and thinking. In School Days, the author transports us back to his childhood, providing a context for the artistic and personal choices he has made as an adult.

The lines are clearly drawn early on in this memoir; young Chamoiseau's teacher, a black Martinican who has adopted both the language and the attitudes of France, is contrasted with the rich cultural and linguistic traditions that thrive outside the school. At school, Teacher lectures on Alexander, Napoleon, the superiority of Western civilization; European fairy-tales about Cinderella and Merlin dominate the classroom while out on the playground, Creole children whisper illicit stories of zombies, water sprites, and flying sorceresses. Light-skinned children become favorites; dark-skinned ones are subjected to Teacher's ridicule; Creole equals shame. The students' sense of confusion is heightened even further when Teacher becomes ill and a substitute takes over the class for a week. This teacher, imbued with the ideals of "Negritude," replaces white with black, strawberry with calabash, Gaul with African, yet remains as dogmatic in his own way as Teacher.

School Days is a ribald, terrifying, ultimately joyful journey through Patrick Chamoiseau's formative years. At the end, the author's younger self begins to master French at last, but he also finds" bit by bit by bit the homey little Creole in his head was joined by scraps of French words, phrases...There was no looking back...." In these lines, Chamoiseau provides a glimpse of the man this boy will eventually become.

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Texaco: A Novel

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"Chamoiseau is a writer who has the sophistication of the modern novelist, and it is from that position (as an heir of Joyce and Kafka) that he holds out his hand to the oral prehistory of literature."
--Milan Kundera

Of black Martinican provenance, Patrick Chamoiseau gives us Texaco (winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize), an international literary achievement, tracing one hundred and fifty years of post-slavery Caribbean history: a novel that is as much about self-affirmation engendered by memory as it is about a quest for the adequacy of its own form.

In a narrative composed of short sequences, each recounting episodes or developments of moment, and interspersed with extracts from fictive notebooks and from statements by an urban planner, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the saucy, aging daughter of a slave affranchised by his master, tells the story of the tormented foundation of her people's identity. The shantytown established by Marie-Sophie is menaced from without by hostile landowners and from within by the volatility of its own provisional state. Hers is a brilliant polyphonic rendering of individual stories informed by rhythmic orality and subversive humor that shape a collective experience.

A joyous affirmation of literature that brings to mind Boccaccio, La Fontaine, Lewis Carroll, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Joyce, Texaco is a work of rare power and ambition, a masterpiece.

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In Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau is not scared of reimagining history in order to illuminate an essential truth about his homeland, Martinique. Through his narrator, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, a daughter of slaves, he chronicles 150 years in the history of Martinique, starting with the birth of Marie-Sophie's beloved father, Esternome, on a sugar plantation sometime in the early 19th century. It ends with her founding Texaco, a shanty town built on the grounds of an old oil refinery on the outskirts of Fort-de-France. What happens in-between is an astounding flight of imagination and language that rivals the works of Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Chamoiseau begins in the present with the arrival of an urban planner, whom the residents of Texaco mistake for Christ. It then spins back in time to the birth of Esternome and the death of his father, who was suspected of witchcraft by a white plantation owner. In myriad short sequences, the novel follows Esternome's progress as he is first freed by his master, then drawn away from the plantation by the lure of St. Pierre--"City" in the minds of the disenfranchised black population of Martinique. He is eventually washed up on the outskirts of Fort-de-France, which becomes "City" after St. Pierre is destroyed by a volcanic eruption. With the birth of Marie-Sophie, Chamoiseau takes the reader into the present century--through two world wars, riots, famine, political turmoil. The tension always simmers between "City," a metaphor for France, and the countryside where black Martinique's collective consciousness resides.

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Creole Folktales

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In this unusual collection of stories and fables, Goncourt prize-winner Patrick Chamoiseau re-creates in truly magical language the stories he heard as a child in Martinique.

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Solibo Magnificent

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Chamoiseau's grand and intriguing riff on the police procedural, "Solibro Magnificent" represents another masterpiece by the author of the award-winning "Texaco". It's carnival time at Fort-de-France, Martinique. Before an enraptured public, the great teller of tales, Solibro Magnificent, is felled, seemingly choked by his own words. Is it autostrangulation or murder? .

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When Patrick Chamoiseau, Martinican author of the brilliant, magical novel Texaco, turns his hand to writing a police procedural, you can be sure that the "usual suspects" won't be usual at all. In Solibo Magnificent the title character, a master storyteller, dies on the first page, having uttered the mysterious phrase patat'-si ("this potato"). Though it is evident to his Creole audience that Solibo's throat was "snickt by the Word," to the Fort-de-France police department it's a clear case of murder. Before you can say patat'-si, all the witnesses are in custody, where they are brutally mistreated in an attempt to wrest confessions from them.

The first thing any reader notices about a Chamoiseau novel is the language (beautifully translated from the French by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov), which tends to tumble in cataracts of vivid imagery, almost as if it were being spoken instead of written. And given that this novel is really about the slow death of an oral tradition at the hands of a culture of literacy, the hurly-burly style is singularly appropriate. Though Solibo Magnificent can certainly be enjoyed simply as a tragicomic tale of mysterious death and police bungling, readers with even a superficial knowledge of Martinique's history as a French colony (and now departement) will find plenty of philosophical gold in the deeper veins of meaning that lie beneath the surface of the novel. There is, for example, the conflict between the deeply rooted Creole culture--an orally transmitted tradition of stories, demons, magic, and community--and the imposed colonial system of logic, scientific proof, the written word, and French as the dominant language. In such a world, Solibo the storyteller cannot live, and Chamoiseau--himself a character in the novel--is fully aware of the irony of committing his tale to the page. As he says at the end of the novel,

"I understood that to write down the word was nothing but betrayal, you lost the intonations, the parody, the storyteller's gestures.... I decided to squeeze out a reduced, organized, written version, a kind of ersatz of what the Master had been that night: it was clear now that his words, his true words, all of his words, were lost for all of us--and forever."

Solibo's throat might be "snickt by the word," his "true words" lost forever, but fortunately Patrick Chamoiseau, the "word-scratcher," is still here to remind us of just how much we've lost.

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L'intraitable beauté du monde (French Edition)

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