Patrick Lohier

Being black in North America in general, and in Canada specifically, is a confounding experience. Literary critic Donna Bailey Nurse’s book, Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing, explores the struggle to fit into contemporary Canadian society and create new, individuated identities. Read my review here.

A boy and a girl in a rowboat drift away from a riverbank in the Devon, England, village of Cameldip in 1958. They intend to go on a short adventure, but soon find themselves adrift, and they drown when the boat founders. For the next 30 years, their parents, Isabel and Robert MacKinnon, live in a grief-stricken purgatory. Read my review of Tricia Wastvedt’s first novel, The River, here.

If you’re in the habit of judging books by their covers, as I often am, the small size, flowery, impressionistic title and pastel-hued dust jacket of the hardcover edition of The Swallows of Kabul is terribly misleading. Held in hand, the book feels airy and insubstantial, but inside is a riveting story of terror and redemption, told with haunting power and captivating grace. Read my review here.

Unusual suspects

When I was growing up in Philadelphia, the adults at our family gatherings told hilarious tall tales of their pasts in Haiti. These stories were told in Creole, usually with the unbridled theatricality of screwed-up faces, silly walks and mimicry verging on virtuosity. The grownups had all been educated in the rigid conjugations of the French language. But Creole was for them the language of laughter, camaraderie and, most importantly, stories. Martiniquan writer Patrick Chamoiseau achieved renown in the U.S. last year with the publication of his novel Texaco in translation. Now Chamoiseau’s novel Solibo Magnificent, originally published in Creole in 1988, has been released in English. Like much of his other work, Solibo Magnificent is about the power of language, particularly Creole, to mesmerize.

In Solibo, Chamoiseau has turned police procedure into a tragicomic riff on the decline of the Creole oral tradition. It’s Carnival time in Fort-de-France, Martinique. Solibo Magnificent, popular man-about- town, bon-vivant, charcoal vendor and charismatic storyteller, lies dead at the foot of a tamarind tree, surrounded by a motley assortment of fourteen witnesses. Chief Inspector Evariste Pilon, a rare “policeman with a brain,” immediately suspects foul play, and hauls in the whole lot. In the time-honored tradition of the whodunit, we see the victimized raconteur from different post-mortem perspectives. As suspect after suspect describes Solibo, Inspector Pilon jots down notes and observes with the “big eyes of a bullfrog tracking maybugs in sugar cane during a drizzle.”

Soon enough, Pilon’s investigation leads to more nefarious complications and to an understanding of the deeper significance of storytelling. He discovers that Solibo “wanted to inscribe his words in our ordinary life, but our life no longer had ears nor hollows where an echo could abide eternal.” On multiple levels, Solibo’s days were numbered, yet paradoxically, perhaps, Chamoiseau finds vibrancy in a very funny requiem for the oral tradition.