Slave Old Man: A Novel
This concentrated, poetic novella follows an elderly enslaved man who flees a plantation in Martinique while his master and a mastiff pursue him. It faces the violence of colonial slavery directly, yet through the forest's strange vitality and a mythic narrative voice it brings freedom's impulse and human dignity into focus.
Work Information
What lies beyond the escape is not only freedom; the forest itself begins to speak of memory and resistance.
Slave Old Man centers on the pursuit of an elderly enslaved man who escapes a sugar plantation in Martinique, followed by his master and a ferocious hound. In a translation that preserves the resonance of French and Creole, the forest's overwhelming presence and the dignity and terror that emerge during the escape become a single intense reading experience.
Review Summaries
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Readers frequently praise the poetic, hallucinatory style and the way history and allegory are layered together. For some, though, the strong symbolism and compressed scale make the book feel demanding.
Book Information
- Publisher
- The New Press
- Published
- 2018-05-01
- Pages
- 176 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.97 x 1.27 x 19.05 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781620972953
- ISBN-10
- 1620972956
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Historical
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 Weekly Best 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.
Born in Martinique, Patrick Chamoiseau is the author of Texaco , which won the Prix Goncourt and was a New York Times Notable Book, as well as Creole Folktakes and The Old Slave (The New Press), among other works.
Reviews
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Wonderful Translation
This Translation wanders back and forth between Allegory and History, with legend, imagination and fancy thrown in for entertainment. The 'stream of consciousness' is outstanding and as you immerse into the main character you become the 'Slave Old Man' and come to understand so much more about the plantation life in that time and place. Wonderful reading, great work of translation while keeping the messaging.
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Introduce yourself to Patrick Chamoiseau, if you haven't already.
Lovely writing. Seems to be an excellent translation. Reading it can be a very worthwhile use of one's time -- for the knowledge embedded in the story, for the thought-provoking insights, for the beauty of the language used and the descriptions presented. Although reading a library hard copy (lovely), I actually bought the kindle copy in order to share a passage with two young people trimming my trees one of the days I was reading it -- an inspirational and descriptive passage about the forest through which the slave was fleeing.
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Magical: A Linguistic tour de force
Chamoiseau's quest for identity in the mélange of cultures that make up the French Caribbean drives the author and this story. His search is exhilarating, a work in progress that brings him close to his destination, but with a way still to go. But for his efforts, however, those on a similar quest would find the going much harder. Be sure to read the "Translator's Afterword". It's masterful. It encouraged me to go back and start the book again to make sure I drew what I could from the story Afterword. In the fifth "Folio" [chapter], the narrative voice jumps from the third person to the first person in mid-paragraph. I am not sure what the author had in mind.My best guess: Chamoiseau is taking the slave story from the past to the present. Please leave me a comment telling me how you see it. Thanks.
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Captivating quick read.
This is a great book. I could not put it down until it was done. Every spare moment, I was reading this book. The symbolism is fantastic. The way things evolve is so interesting. The characters are real and draw you in. I highly recommend this book.
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Tough!
This is one of the toughest books I have read. The language and coordinations are hard to grasp. The old man was running, hallucinating about nature’s raw elements- these felt so surreal to read.