Edouard Glissant's Tout-monde is a text that challenges traditional conceptions of the novelistic genre. Glissant freely admitted to the book's transgressive qualities, remarking in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur shortly after the work's publication in 1993 that tout y est volontairement mele [...] peu importe de savoir exactement qui est qui ou qui fait quoi (Sur la trace). In a subsequent interview included in Introduction a une poetique du divers (1995), he noted that il s'agit bien d'un roman a mon avis, mais d'un roman eclate [...] C'est aussi une oeuvre qui risque un depassement des genres litteraires etablis (129-30). Ostensibly, Tout-monde follows on from his five previous novels, and it therefore includes a Rappel des peripeties qui ont precede (11) at the beginning to remind readers of prior plot events and of the relationships between characters. However, it also contains a plethora of new characters, notes for a travel journal, scenes that resemble passages from a historical novel, long stretches of first-person direct discourse, and excerpts from a text (Traite du tout-monde) that are attributed to the protagonist Mathieu Beluse, but which are later included in Glissant's own 1997 philosophical work of the same title. Moreover, unlike in Glissant's earlier novels, there are a great number of coded references to real-life individuals. Some of their identities are revealed at the end of the book, in the section Sur les noms (605)--for instance, is the French poet Roger Giroux and Gibier is apparently Patrick Chamoiseau--yet since characters who are clearly invented are also mentioned here and many of the unveilings are ambiguous, the frontier between fiction and reality remains decidedly permeable. Tout-monde is additionally distinguished from Glissant's preceding works of fiction because it does not take place exclusively on his native island of Martinique. Its intertwining--though not always interconnected--plot strands are set over five continents and take place during different time periods, jumping back and forth from era to era and moving abruptly from one corner of the globe to another. Glissant is himself a highly enigmatic presence in the work. Several unnamed characters are referred to in the third person as the poet, chronicler, narrator, novelist, or and they share biographical details with the author: a wife called Sylvie (369), a home in Baton Rouge (548), a son named Mathieu (553). The poet character is also identified now and again as Godby or Godbi--Glissanti childhood nickname (Traite 78). However, the reader is warned not to make too much out of these associations, as the end of the book cautions that deparleur, le poete, le chroniqueur, le romancier, gagez pas que c'est l'auteur du livre, vous vous tromperiez a coup sur (606). To complicate matters further, there are various anonymous first-person narrators who frequently designate themselves with these epithets, and the character Mathieu Beluse--not to be confused with Glissant's actual son, Mathieu--adopts such scribal functions, too, as it is noted that Mathieu, deparleur, chroniqueur, romancier, c'etait quatre-en-un (408). Glissant teases and tantalizes, and there are multiple instances when the text appears to justify an autobiographical reading or invite an interpretation of its words as expressions of his own views or experiences. Yet simultaneously, the fictional, polyphonic nature of Tout-monde frustrates such an approach, rendering it difficult to pin down the author and his thoughts. (1) Both the form and content of the text are therefore opaque in many ways. Partly, this can be linked to Glissant's theory of opacity, a crucial aspect of his thinking since the beginning of his career that is especially evident in L'Intention poetique. There, in the chapter Sur l'opacite, Glissant praises the fact that characters in the novels of William Faulkner ne sont pas denses de psychologie, mais d'attache a leur glebe (168), suggesting that their anchorage in the landscape of the Deep South reveals more about them than any attempted gloss by the author, and that Faulkner's lack of insight into the motivations of his black characters is ultimately something positive, as they maintain an unfathomable alterity that underscores the tragedy of their social alienation (169-70). …