Dany Laferrière

This book was really strange. As I was reading it, I wasn’t sure why I continued to read it because there were parts of the story I couldn’t even follow. Near the end, there was a chapter that seemed to have nothing to do with this story. Yet I felt compelled to read it through to the end. Looking back, I found some lines that were funny. I also found references to things Japanese which I liked. The premise of the story was unusual in that it was about a writer who became famous for a novel he did not write. So, the book had some lighter and good moments, but it didn’t exactly move me.

I know that this author has a good reputation for his works. I would like to try some of his other books to see what they’re like.… (more)

Dany Laferriere was a journalist in Haiti when Papa Doc Cuvalier was in power. "When a colleauge was found murdered by a roadside, Laferriere took the hint and went into exile in Canada." He settled in Montreal, took a factory job and started writing this novel. Although it is fiction there are quite a few autobiographical details so we get an idea of the immigrant experience and also the black experiences in a predominately white culture.

The narrator is living in a squalid room on St-Denis with a view of the cross on top of Mont Royal. He shares this room with his friend Bouba who sleeps, plays jazz, reads the Koran and acts as a guru to a number of white women. It is a sweltering summer and, of course, there is no air conditioning in the apartment. The narrator has one steady girlfriend, a white rich girl referred to as Miz Literature, but also a few ancillary girls he takes to bed. The way he tells it the white girls like black men because they are so much better in bed than white men. However, that is not all there is to our hero. He reads voraciously and has a vast knowledge of modern and ancient literature. He also is nice to the women he is involved with. I never got a sense that he just saw them as sex objects alone; he genuinely likes them. There are a few misogynistic remarks about women that aren't beautiful but thinking of the times (the book was published in French in 1985) I'm sure most men probably felt the same. Ultimately the book is a celebration of life in a vibrant, multi-cultural city.

Despite the race preference espoused by the narrator of the book Laferriere himself is married to a black woman and that marriage has persisted for over forty years. Given that bit of knowledge I suspect that Laferriere wrote the book with tongue firmly planted in cheek, using a belief common among racist whites that black men just live to f**k. CBC picked this book as one of the 100 Novels that Make Us Proud to be Canadian and I think it was a good choice.… (more)

This is one of those books with fantastic passages where the author let’s rip. Sometimes funny and often shocking. At one point my mouth was hanging open. But by the end of the book my teeth were gritted and I was repulsed and revulsed by the picture of people reduced below the level of humanity, each just a type and each type just a collection of desires. Life so small and so squalid. Art reduced to the acquisition of money and the appreciation of art defined by the type of person.

Not that this is a bad book. The author’s doing this on purpose. There’s literary quality here and it’s certainly effective. I appreciated it but didn’t enjoy it.… (more)

This book has no plot. I knew this going in and it served me well. There can’t be a plot as time does not flow in this book in quite the normal way. The tense is constantly changing. It must have taken the author (and translator) absolutely ages to write, exerting such technical control over every sentence. I appreciated reading a book that had had such care taken over it.

But time isn’t irrelevant to the characters. History is oral and each character has a different version. The future is foretold in dreams. In other words the past is a rumour and a future a dream.

There’s a lot going on in this book, one of them being the coupling of disparate elements. Take chapter one, the sections The Park, Animals and The Game. First the idyll of the horses grazing, but they’re injured. Then the boys playing football beside them, but one has green flies in its eye. That coupling of an idyll and disease. Then the boy injured by the horse who eats all the leeches. That coupling of disease and humour. Finally the boys playing football until darkness falls. Darkness representing death here. These are themes and images that are returned to again many times in this, what, prose poem?

It’s also very funny. I loved the bit with the inkwells and the little blue penises.… (more)