Available:*
Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | FIC CHAMOISEAU | 30470001615862 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Merrimac Public Library | F CHA | 32125001262911 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | FIC CHAMOISEAU P | 32128003658656 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | F CHAMOISEAU | 31990004643230 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The "heart-stopping" (The Millions), "richly layered" (Brooklyn Rail), "haunting, beautiful" (BuzzFeed) story of an escaped captive and the killer hound that pursues him
"Slave Old Man is a cloudburst of a novel, swift and compressed--but every page pulses, blood-warm. . . . The prose is so electrifyingly synesthetic that, on more than one occasion, I found myself stopping to rub my eyes in disbelief."
--Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Patrick Chamoiseau's Slave Old Man was published to accolades in hardcover in a brilliant translation by Linda Coverdale, winning the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and chosen as a Publishers WeeklyBest Book of 2018.
Now in paperback, Slave Old Man is a gripping, profoundly unsettling story of an elderly enslaved person's daring escape into the wild from a plantation in Martinique, with his enslaver and a fearsome hound on his heels. We follow them into a lush rain forest where nature is beyond all human control: sinister, yet entrancing and even exhilarating, because the old man's flight to freedom will transform them all in truly astonishing--even otherworldly--ways, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest reshapes reality and time itself.
Chamoiseau's exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose. Offering a loving and mischievous tribute to the Creole culture of early nineteenth-century Martinique, this novel takes us on a unique and moving journey into the heart of Caribbean history.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
An escaped slave is hunted by a hound who "burst the bounds of utter slavering rage" in this heart-pounding novel from Chamoiseau (Texaco), Martinique's great chronicler of the atrocity of Caribbean slavery. The old man, once believed to be the "most docile among the docile" slaves on an island plantation, slips away unnoticed, with "no ruminations, no grim glance toward the woods." He has a head start on the plantation owner's favored mastiff; by the time the animal that has already killed a half dozen fugitives is loosed, the old man is deep in the island's forest, where "the leaves were many, green in infinite ways, as well as ochre, yellow, maroon, crinkled, dazzling." The ensuing pursuit is electric and illuminating: for the old man, Chamoiseau writes, "the mastiff on his heels is showing him his own unknowns." These insights into his mental strength show how the old man manages to persevere through a fall into a wellspring, branches that leave him "covered in bright blood and scabs," and an encounter with a viper, en route to the book's climactic confrontation. Chamoiseau's prose is astounding in its beauty-and is notable for its blending of French and Creole-and he ups the stakes by making this novel a breathtaking thriller, as well. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Few authors embody literary movements as authentically as Martinique-born Chamoiseau, who pioneered the créolité (creoleness) genre in the 1980s, producing screenplays, essay collections, and novels, including Texaco (1997), recipient of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, France's top literary prize. In this slim novel, originally published in French in the late 1990s, the titular slave escapes the confines of plantation life only to encounter a wilderness dense with spirits both familiar and unexpected. Even deceptively everyday creatures, like the mastiff sent by the master to pursue escaping slaves, transmogrify into terrifying demons, possessed by the vibrant orange tints of a living heart of fire. Passages like this, rich with imagery and music, occasionally flecked with vivid creole vernacular, can be plucked from any paragraph on any page. One can't help but wonder why it took so long for this treasure to be translated into English. But it is here now, and the world Chamoiseau creates through the eyes of this aging runaway reveals the enduring cruelty of bondage and the endless creativity of its survivors and their descendants.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE GREAT BELIEVERS, by Rebecca Makkai. (Viking, $27.) A novel that ricochets between Chicago in the mid-1980s, an era when AIDS was a death sentence, and present-day Paris, where the shadow of its contagion still looms over a mother in search of her errant daughter. THE PERFECT WEAPON: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, by David E. Sanger. (Crown, $28.) This encyclopedic account by a Times correspondent traces the rapid rise of cyberwarfare capabilities and warns that ideas about how to control them are only beginning to emerge. SLAVE OLD MAN, by Patrick Chamoiseau. Translated by Linda Coverdale. (New Press, $19.99.) Set in plantation-era Martinique, this novel is a kind of action pastoral, tracing a slave's desperate escape from a savage master and his monstrous mastiff. His exhilarating flight evokes the shock of freedom with tactile immediacy. AMERICAN EDEN: David Hosack, Botany and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic, by Victoria Johnson. (Liveright, $29.95.) The doctor to the infamous Hamilton-Burr duel also created a legendary botanical garden for early America, now buried far beneath Rockefeller Center. Johnson tells his story. DAMNATION ISLAND: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th-Century New York, by Stacy Horn. (Algonquin, $27.95.) A detailed consideration of the appalling history of the East River penitentiaries and asylums where the city once held its undesirables in forcible exile. ELASTIC: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change, by Leonard Mlodinow. (Pantheon, $28.95.) "Elastic thinking" is the ability to stretch beyond the bounds of our preconceptions and other deeply held beliefs. Mlodinow tries to understand how this happens in the brain, what it takes to arrive at human creativity, innovation and independent thought. SEARCHING FOR STARS ON AN ISLAND IN MAINE, by Alan Lightman. (Pantheon, $24.95.) In tightly composed essays, a noted astrophysicist and novelist argues that science need not be in conflict with spirituality. An elegant and moving paean to our quest for meaning in an age of reason. THIS LITTLE ART, by Kate Briggs. (Fitzcarraldo, paper, $20.) Briggs, a translator of Roland Barthes, here offers a philosophical meditation on the perils and pleasures of her vocation, one she compares to Robinson Crusoe's efforts to fashion a table - an act of "laboriously remaking an existing thing." FOX & CHICK: The Party and Other Stories, by Sergio Ruzzier. (Chronicle, $14.99; ages 5 to 8.) Friendship can be challenging as well as comforting. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Library Journal Review
Along with their freedom, enslaved peoples are robbed of their names and languages, those important measures of identity. But their memories can never be taken from them. In an homage to the colonized races of his native Martinique, Prix Goncourt winner Chamoiseau spins a fable of a "vieux-negre," an elderly black man who has toiled on a sugar plantation for as long as anyone can remember. Now aged and silent, he is invisible to all but the enslaver's giant mastiff, a terrifying cur as cruel and dangerous as its master. Therefore, so the story goes, quite some time elapses before anyone except the dog realizes that the old man has disappeared. He has plunged into the darkness of the Great Woods, where the voices of generations who have fled and died before him encourage his every painful step to freedom. Their collective memories inhabit his subconscious mind, empowering the old man to face head-on the evil that's tracking him. VERDICT Published in France in 1997, this allegorical novella has been translated into English with extensive notes on various French and Creole phrases for ease of comprehension. It will appeal to readers drawn to slave narratives, folk tales, and the ineffable power of storytelling.-Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.