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About Texaco: A Novel
Product Description "Chamoiseau is a writer who has the sophistication of the modern novelist, and it is from that position (as an heir of Joyce and Kafka) that he holds out his hand to the oral prehistory of literature." --Milan Kundera Of black Martinican provenance, Patrick Chamoiseau gives us Texaco (winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize), an international literary achievement, tracing one hundred and fifty years of post-slavery Caribbean history: a novel that is as much about self-affirmation engendered by memory as it is about a quest for the adequacy of its own form. In a narrative composed of short sequences, each recounting episodes or developments of moment, and interspersed with extracts from fictive notebooks and from statements by an urban planner, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the saucy, aging daughter of a slave affranchised by his master, tells the story of the tormented foundation of her people's identity. The shantytown established by Marie-Sophie is menaced from without by hostile landowners and from within by the volatility of its own provisional state. Hers is a brilliant polyphonic rendering of individual stories informed by rhythmic orality and subversive humor that shape a collective experience. A joyous affirmation of literature that brings to mind Boccaccio, La Fontaine, Lewis Carroll, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Joyce, Texaco is a work of rare power and ambition, a masterpiece. Review The novel returns obsessively to the power, beauty, frustrations and extreme political importance of language -- specifically the French language, and its relation not only to racial identity but to what the translators refer to as ''Mulatto French'' and ''Creole French.'' Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov's translation into English of such a complex original is brilliant in its musical integrity and imagistic precision. It is also faithful to the novel's exuberant, unrestrained excess. -- Leonard Michaels, The New York Times Book Review 'TEXACO' IS A WORK OF ART, TRANSLATION A PERFECT COPY: Mr. Chamoiseau wrote Texaco in a freestyle mishmash of French and Martinican Creole dialects. The translation by Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov is a virtual work of art in its own right, dead-on in its colloquial re-creation of the novel's storyteller orality. -- The Dallas Morning News Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov merit high praise for taking Chamoiseau's French and Creole braids of gritty reality and sublime fancy, and weaving them afresh in a truly delectable, island-flavored English (with a helpful glossary included.) -- Chicago Tribune Translators Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov handle the demanding text by fashioning a vivid, muscular lyricism that deftly articulates the ongoing contrast between the exalted and the everyday. The resulting poetry is constant... -- St. Petersburg Times The language itself, even in translation, is extraordinarily various, vivid, and exact. In recovering the "imaginings" of the newly freed slave, it can be epigrammatic ("roads uncover solitude and suggest other lives"), or lyrically ecstatic ("he felt himself glisten like sea under moon"). -- The Boston Sunday Globe From the Inside Flap "Chamoiseau is a writer who has the sophistication of the modern novelist, and it is from that position (as an heir of Joyce and Kafka) that he holds out his hand to the oral prehistory of literature." --Milan Kundera Of black Martinican provenance, Patrick Chamoiseau gives us "Texaco (winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize), an international literary achievement, tracing one hundred and fifty years of post-slavery Caribbean history: a novel that is as much about self-affirmation engendered by memory as it is about a quest for the adequacy of its own form. In a narrative composed of short sequences, each recounting episodes or developments of moment, and interspersed with extracts from fictive notebooks and fr
