When the Night

Abstract

58 World Literature Today reviews of fundamentalist fervor, and racial bias, which lead her toward loneliness and alcoholism even as her star rises politically. Askew shows incomparable skill for illuminating the complicated and immediate context in which lifechanging decisions are made. While Sweet is trying to keep Misty and her husband from the sheriff’s clutches in the church where she has claimed sanctuary for him, she also has to consider the fact that her grandniece, Lucha, needs food and diapers and is being traumatized by the situation without the capacity to understand what is happening. Sweet must negotiate basic problems such as a maxed-out credit card, no money for gas, and icy roads, all while trying to outwit a blustering, headline-hogging sheriff. Not only must she deal with a husband who wants to dominate her and yet is afraid of her superior moral power, she must also face the fact that her own son is a bully and a whiner, while her nephew, Dustin, son of her dead sister who was a drug addict, is much more like her—strong and loving. Askew’s message is grim, but far from noir or cynical. She manages deep suspense and deep character study with apparent effortlessness. Askew immerses us in the frightening dynamics of every situation while illustrating the focused moral prescience of a novelist of superb acumen. Her Oklahomans prove that character is at once its own reward and its own punishment, and that the prosperity of moral treason is hollow. Jim Drummond Norman, Oklahoma Patrick Chamoiseau. L’empreinte à Crusoé. Paris. Gallimard. 2012. isbn 9782070136186 Rewritings of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe have been numerous, especially among Caribbean writers. Robinson Crusoe presumably landed on the island of Tobago, and the slave trade and domination of one race by another are prominent themes. Patrick Chamoiseau’s previous work often centered on the political . With L’empreinte à Crusoé (Crusoe ’s footprint), he focuses on the imaginary. The story is told as a continuous monologue with no periods but with semicolons, which he considers a means of keeping the story flowing. There is no clear plot. The person stranded on a deserted island is at first puzzled, looks for a ship to rescue him, but soon feels himself the “only master, after God and the seigneur, of the island.” He invents rituals to live by, writes in a small book he found on the wreckage of the ship, plants crops, and tends animals. Then he discovers a footprint in the sand, which obsesses him. There is an Other; because of the presence of the other, he begins to look at the world with poetic, not practical aims. He joins the turtles in a great ecstatic dance. He builds an artistic wall around the footprint and sees the island as a living organism . He invents another himself, Sunday, who forces him to rethink his identity: “Perhaps the idiot that I had become after all these years was transformed into a small person.” He also reads fragments he found in the ship, passages by Parmenides and Heraclitus, who knew that there was an unknowable grandeur. Beautifully and poetically written , the thoughts of the deserted man are reinterpreted in the final chapter of the novel. He was not a slave trader or a European sailor. He was an educated Muslim Dogon from Mali who worked with Robinson Crusoe, the captain of a slave ship. Crusoe had left him on an island after an accident in which he became delusional. A section labeled “L’Atelier,” Chamoiseau’s notes for the composition of his work, completes the novel. He realizes he cannot reproduce the innocent narration of Defoe’s story, which fascinated him as a child. He cites other influences on his imagination , including Michel Tournier’s Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (1967) as well as Derek Walcott, Édouard Glissant, and even Pascal. For him the story must be “interior and mental ,” must move in spirals, and must reflect the problems of individuality in the contemporary world. Patrick Chamoiseau’s poetic person is far from the world of Defoe. Adele King Paris Cristina Comencini. When the Night. Marina Harss, tr. New York. Other Press. 2012. isbn...