Novel
The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life
George W. Cable · 1880
Opening lines
It was in the Théatre St. Philippe (they had laid a temporary floor over the parquette seats) in the city we now call New Orleans, in the month of September, and in the year 1803.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
In 1803, the day after the sale of Louisiana, a young American born to German parents lands with his family in the Louisiana capital; fever carries them off and he is left alone. He opens an apothecary's shop in a city whose language he speaks poorly and where the arrival of the Americans humiliates the old Creole families. His landlord is a free man of colour who bears the same name as the head of the Grandissime clan, his white half-brother, and the apothecary gradually discovers what binds them. People tell one another in veiled words the story of an African prince sold into slavery.
Context
The text ran in Scribner's Monthly from November 1879 to October 1880, then came out in volume form with Scribner, and its author revised it in 1883. As early as 1880, Abbé Adrien Rouquette mocked it in a pamphlet, and the author's positions would end up getting him called a traitor in his own city. In 1884 and 1885, he toured more than sixty towns with Mark Twain on a reading tour. The critic Louis D. Rubin saw in it the first modern novel of the South, and it has been compared to William Faulkner.
Who it is for
A long novel in which information is withheld and family ties are discovered late. The dialogues render the Creole accent and the speech of the slaves; only one French translation exists, from 2001.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's greatest achievement, and as one of the first Southern novels to place the question of race at the centre.
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