Guadeloupe (France) / All works
Novel
Crossing the Mangrove
Traversée de la mangrove
Maryse Condé · 1989
Synopsis
At Rivière au Sel, a village in Guadeloupe, Léocadie Timothée, a retired schoolteacher, finds the body of Francis Sancher in the mud. This stranger, who had arrived from Cuba a few years earlier, intrigued the village and had foretold his own death. For the length of the wake, those who knew him gather, and each in turn says what he was to them.
Context
The novel came out from Mercure de France in 1989 and was reissued in paperback by Folio in 1992. It takes place entirely during a wake, where some twenty villagers speak one after another and each gives their own version of the stranger, without the novelist deciding between them. Richard Philcox, her second husband and the translator of most of her books, published it in English in 1995 with Anchor, in New York, under the title Crossing the Mangrove.
Who it is for
For reading Guadeloupe in many voices, and a village that reveals itself by speaking of someone other than itself.
Prizes and reception
Reissued in paperback three years after its publication; translated into English by Richard Philcox in 1995.
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