Synopsis
Winner of the Prix Goncourt, this novel tells the story of 150 years of Caribbean history via the remembrances of Sophie Laborieux, an aging freedom-fighter and the daughter of a slave.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1998-03-01 | | Edition Description: | Reprint |
| Size | | Length: | 401 pages | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 12.0 oz |
Publisher's Note
"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 KunderaOf black Martinican provenance, Patrick Chamoiseau gives us Texaco (winner of the Prix Goncourt, Frances 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.
Patrick Chamoiseau produces a mythic history of the Creole nation that arose from the forced marriage of French and African peoples in his native Martinique. The chief spokeswoman for that nation is the indomitable and profanely wise Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the founder of Texaco, a teeming shantytown poised on the edge of a city that constantly threatens to engulf it. Now Marie-Sophie is Texaco's protectress as well. For only she can dissuade an urban planner from ordering her anarchic quarter razed to the ground. Like Scheherazade before her, she relies on stories - stories of slaves and sorcerers, thugs and courtesans, uprisings and eruptions.
Industry Reviews
"Mr. Chamoiseau's glittering multilingual novel presents 150 years of history on the island of Martinique as stories and fantasies in which events are given the power of metaphor."
Atlantic Monthly - Phoebe-Lou Adams (03/19/1997)
"A master storyteller....[P]rojects the wide-screen liberation of a people through language....The greatest hero of them all is Chamoiseau's language."
Los Angeles Times Book Review - Jonathan Levi (03/02/1997)
"[T]his novel is not only about language. It is about freedom and history and exploitation and colonialism and the underdog....It is about injustice and destiny and the indomitability of the human spirit..."
Literary Review - Teresa Waugh (03/19/1997)
"[A] novel made of stories unrecorded in any history book, for they are stories 'beneath history', telling of love, sex, work, murder, and political action among the black slaves of Martinique and their descendants. Both true and fabulous, the stories constitute a personal and communal record of black experience on the island from the early days of slavery through its abolition and beyond..."
New York Times Book Review - Leonard Michaels (03/30/1997)
"'Texaco' is a great stew of a book, a seething callaloo simmering with characters, incident, reflection, aphorism, anguish....[A] voice that is sometimes elegant, sometimes slangy, and in scenes that mingle the magical with the mundane..."
Washington Post Book World - Linda Wolfe (05/25/1997)
"Chamoiseau's high-energy prose brilliantly renders all the relevant permutations and particulars of class conflict..."
Griffin
"[O]ne of the best-received foreign books in the United States in a decade. It takes on some of the great common themes of the Americas: slavery, power, colonialism, memory (and its loss), and history. In 'Texaco' everything revolves around ownership and power, the sullen, persistent leftovers of slavery....And the book is redolent of Creole, one of the languages of the French Caribbean....The language is full of friction, with the Latinate rubbing against the African. Some words come with hidden provenance; in a context of cultural mixture, the sound becomes aromatic. And the language comes with a role in history. Each of the countries where it is spoken, from Haiti to French Guiana, has its own relationship to it, from embarrassment to pride; everything depends on the speaker's relationship to its African identity."<BR> It is rich as a metaphor, and Chamoiseau has turned the language into a philosophical system of generosity, where both the European and the African are accepted and reveled in.
New York Times - Peter Watrous (05/27/1997)
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