La belle amour humaine by Lyonel Trouillot

Abstract

Ladislav Klíma Glorious Nemesis Twisted Spoon Press A tale of love and death, this balladic novella recounts one man’s quest for the All and the Absolute. Drawing from his complex mental state, the author creates an intriguing world of phantasm and obsession. Translated for the first time into English, this Czech story encapsulates Klíma’s style and eccentricity. Brendan Kennelly The Essential Brendan Kennelly Wake Forest University Press This collection highlights the prolific writings of well-known Irish poet Brendan Kennelly. The anthology illustrates the life and evolution of Kennelly’s poetry by combining elements of satire and rich Dublin culture. The book is accompanied by a CD of poems read by the author. march–april 2012 | 73 Nota Bene Lyonel Trouillot. La belle amour humaine. Arles, France / Montréal. Actes Sud / Leméac. 2011. isbn 9782742799206 / 9782760907294 After L’amour avant que j’oublie (2007; see WLT, July 2008, 69) about the passion of writing, and Yanvalou pour Charlie (2009) about loving one’s fellow man, Haitian writer Lyonel Trouillot’s La belle amour humaine interrogates one’s responsibility to others. Written fifty years after the disappearance of Jacques-Stephen Alexis, the novel recaptures the New Year’s wishes he expressed in his 1957 letter to mankind bearing the same title. Among the four finalists for the 2011 Goncourt Prize, and the recipient of the 2011 Grand Prix du Roman Métis, La belle amour humaine draws a modern-day carte de tendre, a map to the heart of the human condition. Composed of two monologues and a closing third-person narrative, La belle amour humaine opens in medias res with a legend-like flashback imbued with magic realism. Recounted by Thomas, a voluble taxi driver –cum–tourist guide, it harks back twenty years to one idyllic day and night nearing perfection in the coastal village of Anse-à-Fôleur, when the community’s two outsiders—Robert Montès, a rapacious mulatto business man, and Pierre André Pierre, a brutal noiriste colonel—disappeared in the flames that burned their identical vacation homes to cinders, an event forever shrouded in the villagers ’ contagious generous love, as bountiful as the fishermen’s catch that magical morning. The pretext for throwing open a window onto this village is a letter that twenty-year-old Anaïse writes to Frank Joseph, the renowned local painter, asking to come and learn about her father, the son of Montès who left Anse-à-Fôleur shortly after the fire, and who died when she was three. Literally and figuratively in the driver’s seat, Thomas, the painter’s nephew, fetches Anaïse and talks her ear off on the seven-hour drive to Anse-à-Fôleur. As they go between the capital (an unnamed yet recognizable Port-au-Prince) and the village, Thomas recounts with anecdotes, enigmas, aphorisms, maxims, proverbs , rhetorical questions, and intertextual allusions a web of stories that link the village to the capital and to the world. Tinted with irony, his long monologue plays with all sorts of preconceived ideas to denounce misappropriations of power and the concomitant injustice that segregates the rich from the poor. Placing the selfserving miscreants of the world at the margins of his story, he warns his passenger about what (not) to expect to learn and understand from the characters at the heart of his world: the welcoming villagers, Frantz Joseph the blind seer, Solène the peacemaker, and Justin the legislator of happiness. In answer to Thomas’s long tirade, Anaïse’s monologue fills in what her letter left unsaid and contrasts her Western-styled upbringing with what she experiences as she finds herself and learns about happiness in Anse- à-Fôleur. Whereas the two monologues dialogically impart the antagonisms that divide the societies of the world, the final chapter narrates Solène’s gestures of reciprocity and conciliation as the villagers accompany Frantz Joseph to his final resting place. Artfully historical, fictionally sociological, mysteriously haunting, Lyonel Trouillot ’s poet(h)ical circumscription of a realistic utopia leaves open the window to la belle amour humaine. Sarah Davies Cordova University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee ...