Лучшие книги Патрика Шамуазо

NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE AND BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2018

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOKS OF 2018

CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS 'MOST ANTICIPATED FICTION BOOKS OF 2018'


'(A) beautiful book, by a writer who's as original as any I've read all year' Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

'My favorite Caribbean writer' Junot Diaz

'A cloudburst of a novel, swift and compressed- but every page pulses, blood-warm. .

On the edge of Fort de France, the capital of Martinique, squats a shanty town. It goes by the name of Texaco.
One dawn, a stranger arrives - an urban planner, bearing news. Texaco is to be razed to the ground. And so he is lead to Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the ancient keeper of Texaco's history, who invites her guest to take a seat and begins the true story of all that is to be lost.
Texaco i

Robinson Crusoé vient de passer vingt ans de solitude dans son île déserte. Il a dû reconstruire son équilibre. C'est avec fierté - celle d'avoir soumis l'île à sa domination - qu'il entame ce matin-là une promenade rituelle sur la plage où il avait mystérieusement échoué il ya tant d'années. C'est alors qu'il découvre l'inconcevable : dans le sable, une empreinte. Celle d'un homme. Passé l'affolement, puis la posture agressive et guerrière, le solitaire s'élance à la recherche de cet Autre qui lui apporte ce dont il avait oublié l'existence : l'idée même de l'humain. Commence alors une étrange aventure qui le précipite en présence de lui-même et d'une île inconnue jusqu'alors. Celui qui avait réussi à survivre sans civilisation, sans culture, sans autrui, doit maintenat affronter ce qu'il n'aurait pu imaginer ailleurs qu'ici : la relation à l'impensable.

<P>Hailed by Milan Kundera as «an heir of Joyce and Kafka,» Prix Goncourt winner Patrick Chamoiseau is among the leading francophone writers today. With most of his novels having appeared in English, this book opens a new window on his oeuvre. A moving poetic essay that bears witness to the forgotten history of the French penal colony in French Guiana, French Guiana—Memory Traces of the Penal Colony (Guyane—Traces-Mémoires du bagne) is accompanied by more than sixty evocative color photographs by Rodolphe Hammadi and translated, here for the first time, deftly by Matt Reeck.</P><P>In the tradition of his late Martinique compatriot Édouard Glissant, Chamoiseau theorizes a means for recovering indigenous history against Western, colonial overwriting through history with a capital «h.» His prose poetry combines fragments of history with his diarylike notes of a visit to the penal colony's ruins. He uses the phrase «traces-mémoires» (memory traces) to conceptualize how land, ruins, and discarded bits of history return to the surface of time and attention. In doing so, with his prose framed by the eloquent layer of Hammadi's images, he not only suggests rich ways of conceptualizing Caribbean memory but also provides tools applicable to other contexts where aesthetic and ethical approaches to oppressive colonial pasts arise. </P><P>A must for readers of the author's novels in translation, French Guiana—Memory Traces of the Penal Colony will also interest scholars and students of Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, memory and trauma studies, and world literature.</P>