Novel
Le Bain des reliques
Not translated into English
Michèle Rakotoson · 1988
Synopsis
Ranja, a television journalist, leaves the capital for a remote province of Madagascar, where he is to film a mysterious ceremony, the bathing of the royal relics. Around the rite he discovers a country in decline and impoverished, which the novel shows without exoticism or lecturing, letting the Malagasy language be heard at the heart of the French narrative.
Context
The novel appeared in 1988 from Karthala, in the Lettres du Sud series, four years after a collection of short stories, Dadabé; the same year the author received a grant from the Centre national des lettres. D. Ranaivoson studies the place Malagasy holds in it, words left untranslated and incantations quoted in both languages, and B. Malela and G. Parfait already see in it a violence of language that her later books would develop. The book, never reissued, has become hard to find.
Who it is for
For discovering Madagascar far from clichés, with the first novel of a great voice of its French-language literature.
Prizes and reception
Romuald Fonkoua judges a purely ethnographic reading of the author's work reductive.
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The pages consulted to check this page.