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Beskrivelse
Possessing one of the most vital voices in international letters, Maryse Cond added to an already acclaimed career the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018. The fourteenth novel by this celebrated author centers on an enigmatic crime blamed on a homeless man whose refuge is the ship La Belle Cr ole, anchored just offshore the city of Port-Mahault. The young gardener Dieudonn Sabrina is acquitted in the murder of his employer--and lover--Loraine, a wealthy white woman descended from plantation owners. Cond follows Dieudonn 's desperate wanderings through the city the night of his release, the narrative unfolding through a series of multivoiced flashbacks set against a forbidding backdrop of social disintegration and tumultuous labor strikes in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Guadeloupe. Twenty-four hours later, Dieudonn 's fate becomes suggestively intertwined with that of the French island itself, though the future of both remains uncertain in the end.
Echoes of Faulkner and Lawrence, and even Shakespeare's Othello, resonate in this tale, yet the drama's uniquely modern dynamics set it apart from any model in its exploration of love and hate, politics and stereotype, and the attempt to find connections with others across barriers. Through her vividly and intimately drawn characters, Cond paints a rich portrait of a contemporary society grappling with the heritage of slavery, racism, and colonization.