Category: Mauritius

Nothing Belongs to You by Nathacha Appanah

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Nothing belongs to you by Nathacha Appanah

Mauritian fiction

Original title – Rien ne t’appartient

Translator Jeffrey Zuckerman

Source – Review copy

It took years between her first book I read and her the last Brother, which I reviewed on this blog. The Last Brother 13 years ago, I’ve read another of the two books that have come out since by her,, but this is her latest and is with a new translator. Jeffrey Zuckerman has taken over for this book, the last but one novel to come out in French. Like her other books, she is very good at mixing childhood with the present. Also, a theme I have seen in the other novels I have read from Mauritius is a class divide, and the main character in this book is someone who has seen both sides of the divide as a kid and then as an adult. We meet Tara in the present but see how her life has twists and turns.

My heart aches again. I should start by clearing the sofa, arranging the cushions, tossing a tartan rug over it, that’ll be the first thing Eli sees, sentimental man that he is, inclined to believe that belongings gain a mysterious, almost human, aura in how they enter our possession, over the years or in connection to some particular moment. He’s attached to things, a dried leaf, a pebble, an old toy, a yellowing book, a faded T-shirt, a broken wooden necklace that belonged to his mother, this sofa. It was on this sofa that his father died three months ago, and I can still smell it there, his scent, trapped in the cushions fibres. It’s not really the scent he had when he was alive but something that remains of him, that tugs at my heart, that brings me back to his absence and everything that’s fallen apart since his death. Notes of vetiver, a touch of lemon, but also a trace of something powdery, slightly rancid.

Her flat is in disarray

The book follows our Narrator, Tara. She is at a low point in her life. Her husband Emmanuel has died, and her world has fallen apart. Her Parisian Is she going mad? Is she losing it? Her kids are worried about her. She is raising a small boy, and this, as she sees him around the house and area, unlocks the past for her. She had a different name. She was called Vijaya and had a privileged childhood with her parents. They were outspoken, and when disaster struck them, she left the young girl in an orphanage and faced a different future than the one she was expecting. The young girl became the woman Tara, and the past is a way for her to change the present. Like most of her books, she deals with death, class, and also memories so well. Also, the dark past of her country shadowed the life of these two characters, who are the same girl/woman. The lost dream of her youth when her parents and now the loss of her husband bring back the past and her struggle after her parent’s death.

When we went into the village, my father didn’t let go of my hand. All eyes followed us, the rich atheists from the huge house, the girl who danced but didn’t go to school, the man who went on the radio and even IV to say that all this coun try’s inhabitants were the same, that every soul should have the freedom to pray to the god he wanted to or not to believe in just one god, that the leaders were idiots, the man who spoke several languages in the same sentence, the husband of the sorceress. Those glares became a swell behind our back.

As the years went by and the swell grew, I had the feeling that it was hissing at us, berating us. At those moments I couldn’t get back to the house soon enough to find my mother, Aya, the school in the alcove, the evenings listening to music and playing cards. I started wishing I wouldn’t grow up, wouldn’t understand, would stay as I was: Vijaya in the grown-ups shadow.

Remembering  her parents and when she wasn’t called Tara but Vijaya a rich girl.

I love her writing it always uses childhood and memories so well. Also, the past is another theme in her books and also her homeland and its highs and lows, the slums, and the high-class world that lives alongside one another.It is one woman’s painful life at the two lowest points in it and how the heart can be broken and rebuilt but at what cost. Loss of parents then the loss of her opartner but the small boy makes he rember how she got past the pain in the past . But also she has held bqack all the sorrow over time and that is shown at the start of the book. Where we see a woman faling apart after the loss of Emmanuel she has stop caring and her flat is in total disarry as her son tries in vain to help her out f the maze of grief it takes a boy and memories to see her change. Like her other novels she seems to pack a lot into a small book this is under two hundred [ages and is one of those books that feels like an epic novel after you have read it.

Winstons score -A One of the best french language writers around.

 

 

 

Riambel by Priya Hein

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Riambel by Priya Hein

Mauritian fiction

Source – Personal copy

The times now I buy a new book that isn’t translated because I have heard about it on social media is slim really. But this book I saw mentioned on Youtube, and after I got it, a few other people mentioned it, I love a slow word-of-mouth book, and this is what I think it is from Indigo Press, a new name to me. Apart from the word of mouth when I saw on the cover, it had a blurb from LE Clézio and her fellow Mauritian writer Anada Devi a writer whose book I loved when I read it because, like this book, it seemed to capture a significant slice of this tropical island but not the lovely beaches from those on the edge of the beauty getting by. Priya Hein had written a number of children’s books and short stories before this her debut novel. She has also won a number of awards, and she now splits her time between Mauritius and Germany.

We live in a cite,or Kon krool( which is how we like to refer to our shanty town). It’s also known as Africa Town – a slum where the poor and the undesirables are dumped together in hastily constructed barracks. Like tins of sardines placed next to each other in a higgledy-piggledy way. Whatever’s found in the trash somehow ends up in our cité, which is nothing but the waste of Riambel discarded in a heap that slowly rots away. A trash-strewn ghetto where everything is starving and fighting to survive – even the dogs.

Her home a shanty called Riambel everything is hard there.

The book is formed around the story of a young girl. She has to finish her school life and join other family members in the big house of The De Grandbourg family. They live in the Riambel, the slum of the city. Noemi is faced with no choice around this change. Still, we see the world through her eyes, those rich people on the other side of the road in the world, but it also mixes the history of the island but with a female twist to that and also has a beautiful idea of using recipes local to the island as well those sort of recipes passed on mother to daughter even the way they were written I had a sense of a card box like my mum had with those precious recipes passed down through the years. But as you read them, there is a sense of how the Western world has crept in on these island recipes over the years as they have been rewritten or verbally passed on. The book is also intersected with poetry from the island that evokes the spirit of the island and its struggles. As we see a young girl wrestling with a life of servitude and recounting how little can change, there is a glimpse of hope. A woman that came on a holiday and stayed seems interested in her. This shows the tension simmering under the island, an island with affluent ex french families still owning land and running things.

Make sure that your prawns are fresh by checking they colour. They should look transparent and smell of the sea Give them a quick rinse in cold water. Pull off their head, tails and legs before removing the shells and the black veins, Once this is done, rinse the prawns again under cold water.Using a ros kari or a stone mortar, crush some garlic cloves together with a small finger of fresh ginger. Pour a little oil in a pan and fry the paste over a medium fire. Add one chopped onion and continue to fry until golden. Throw in your prawns and cook for a couple of minutes. Add one or two chopped tomatoes and one sliced chilli and stir.Throw in some masala and a few curry leaves. Don’t make it too spicy for the whites, otherwise they’ll complain about their delicate stomachs. Stir well until it thickens. Add a little sea salt, but not too much, as the prawns are already salty. Pour in a dash of water if needed. Sprinkle with fresh coriander and serve with pickled vegtables – enn ti zasar legin – and freshly cooked rice

one of the recipes her for a prawn curry I liked the sound of this one.

I think I am amazed by the book as it is a debut novel. It is so well crafted. I love the ways she weaves Noemi’s voice, the island’s poets, and the island’s recipes. It is a personal history of an island, whereas Noemi says the history they learn isn’t there’s. It has the simmering below the surface of a Mauritius, something you felt in Devi’s novel, a sense of a powder keg that never entirely blows. A sense of things not changing. This is an island out of time with other places. Slavery is gone but only in name, and this shows how little hope there is in a slum-like Riambel, no matter how Noemi sees it as having a double meaning. And it is really Rive en belle Beautiful Shore (I love this thought. It captures her as a girl of a certain age). I also loved the usage of the recipes as a way of talking about the island with food as a way of showing changing tastes and how Western ideas drifted in. I hope this has been seen by someone near the Booker. It reminds me of the gems you used to find years ago on the Booker lists. Have you read this book?

Winstons score – ++++++A best book of the year so far !!

Tropic of Violence by Nathacha Appanah

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Tropic_of_Violence.jpg

Tropic of Violence by Nathacha Appanah

Mauritian fiction

Original title – Tropique de la violence

Translator – Geoffrey Strachan

Source – review copy

I often wonder when I review a book from one of the more unusual places around the world if I will ever review another book by the same writer. That was what I wondered over the years when I reviewed Nathacha first book to be translated into English The last brother that was eight years ago , I had seen a copy of another of her books had come out in the US last year which I had been looking at getting so when this dropped through my letterbox I was excited to be reading her writing again. This is set on another French colony of Mayotte which at the time I wrote the review of The last brother she was living of the island of Mayotte this is from her experiences of this distant island.

She points to one of the baby’s eyes. I don’t understand, i can see nothing , the baby’s asleep. ashe becomes impatient, she points to her two eyes, then to mine, then to those of the baby. Oh, is your baby blind ? She shakes her head vigorously ad suddenly the baby begins to wriggle, smacks its lips once or twicce, as if it is searching for the nipple and the young woman holds it out to me as you might do with something theat both frightens you and disgusts you. I don’t know why I take this baby that’s being handed to me and the infant stretches out in my arms and this warm little body snuggling up to me is wonderful, The child opens its eyes. the mother shriks back against the bed.

His mum is scared of him due to his eye colour but what happened to this young woman.

This is the tale of a sons journey to discover who he really is the story opens with Marie she is a nurse the books opens with her story of a failed marriage and her not having her child with her husband this is how she ended up in Mayotte working as a nurse in the frontline of the city so when one day a Baby that has one green and one dark eye that his teen mother feels has the curse of the Jinn on it Marie adopts this baby. She calls him Moise for the first few years of his live everything is great he is in a private school a dog called Bosco after his adoptive Mums favorite writer Henri Bosco. But he is a teen and being raised in this all-white world in a way he knows he is different he questions his background. Then the worst happens his world falls apart when Marie dies so the young boy takes his mom backpack and the boy and the river and sets of to Gaza the large Slum near the capital of Mayotte this brings him into conflict with the head of a local gang Bruce he also meets a policeman Called Oliver and a volunteer called Stephane as the young man tries to discover his past but also tries to survive in the present as Bruce sees him as bad as the white people that come to the  slum to help out.

La Teigne told me about you, he told me he’d met a Black Muzungu but he thought you were African, a proper negro, one of them who wears shirts and trousers and speaks Frenc, not one of them dying in the gutter in rwanda, the Congo or Somalia. He said you followed him everywhere like a dog, that you put your hand into your pocket without a second thought and you were  called Mo and had a weird eye. Weird that’s the word he used, the dumb bastard.

Bruce in Gaza the Slum when Mo first goes there and is seen in a certain way by them.

This has some similar traits to the earlier books a boy struggling for identity which was a thread in the earlier book The last brother. Another common theme is that of identity her it another boy struggling with his childhood and being different. This has been a theme of many books of the years. There is something Dickens at times the story of Moise fits neatly into a Dickens-like story adoption having a good life the losing it could almost be Great Expectations. There is also something a bit Magic realist to this as well the sense of Moise journey that reminded me at times of Marquez writing that sense of viewing the world the way he did is something that we see with Moise.Also the thread of the book by Henri Bosco a writer I haven’t read yet but will be doing at some point.  There is something of a commentary on the place itself Mayotte. This distant colony has struggled with its large refugee population slums which have led to riots on this far-flung piece of France. This won a  big prize for female writing in France the Prix Femina Des Lyceens a prize for Female fiction which is chosen from a shortlist of ten by high school kids.

Eve out of her ruins by Ananda Devi

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First published by Les Fugitives and CB editions in September 2016 ISBN 9780993009341 / 120x180 / paperback with flaps / 160 p / RRP: GBP10.99 Order here. With brutal honesty and poetic urgency, Ananda Devi relates the tale of four young Mauritians trapped in their country's endless cycle of fear and violence: Eve, whose body is her only weapon and source of power; Savita, Eve's best friend, the only one who loves Eve without self-interest, who has plans to leave but will not go alone; Saadiq, gifted would-be poet, inspired by Rimbaud, in love with Eve; Clelio, belligerent rebel, waiting without hope for his brother to send for him from France. Eve Out of Her Ruins is a heartbreaking look at the dark corners of the island nation of Mauritius that tourists never see, a poignant exploration of the construction of personhood at the margins of society, and a harrowing account of the violent reality of life in Devi's native country by the figurehead of Mauritian literature.

Eve out of her ruins by Ananda Devi

Mauritian fiction

Original title –  Ève de ses décombres

Translator  – Jeffrey Zuckerman

Source – personnel copy

When the american list for the best translated book came out on the three percent website this year I decide to order a few of the books from this years list , this was one of those books and since I read my last book from Mauritius the last brother  , I had been wanting to read another Ananda Devi won her first prize when she was fifteen she studied at SOAS in London and had her first works published in the late 1970’s and this was her seventh novel and won the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie.

He dragged me off a corner of the playground , behind a huge  Indian almond tree , he pinned me against the tree’s trunk , and he slipped his hand under my t-shirt. I was wearing a red t-shirt, with a soccer player’s name on it . I don’t remember who anymore . His hand stopped at my breasts , slowly moved up and down, just over the small black points. There hardly anything there. I heard other children shouting and playing .They seemed far away.

Eve first encounter distant like her mind and body split that day !

This is a coming of age book about four teens on the cusp of adulthood in the capital city of Mauritius Port louis , we have Eve the main character in this four voice narrative , she is a young girl that has being using her body to get attention of the boys around her and allowing them to abuse her ad in a way her body is damaged but her mind is still there . Then we have Saad as his chapters are called he shes what is happening to Eve , but wants more ,he loves Eve and has like many men his age discovered Poetry for him it is that of the young Rimbaud as he heard him read in Class  . But also is in the gang they still chase women the same . Another Gang member is the other male character in the book Clelio  he is awaiting family return from France and hopes to follow himself at some point to escape the gang and the world of Port Louis  . Eve also gets abuse at home from her father in fact the last voice in this book is her only Solace a fellow female student she seeks companionship and connection with . There is also a very sinister fifth voice weaving the book with a sinister tale.

You think about her again , as you saw her last . It’s because of him that she had this purplish tinge, this rigidity, this absolute stillness. It’s because of him that she contradicts everything she ever was ; a girl who was laughing thoughtful , warm and alive above all , alive . He was her final moment . It was this face = pasty defeated, unaware of the very meaning of the word love – that she saw at the moment she died.

You will not forgive him

THe fifth detached and chilling voice in this novel with its last words who was she !!

This is a story of growing up in the wild part of a city , I was reminded of the German novel tigermilk where the lead female character like Eve start to use their bodies for sex and a sort of instant gratification but also the hollow feeling that Eve has in her life. There is also a sense of pace Zuckerman has caught in the translation this remind  me of another book from its us publisher Deep Vellum . Tram 83 which also feature characters in what like Port louis is a town on the edge of Chaos , where like Cleio most youngsters are looking to escape to France. The uk publisher of this book is Les fugitives a new publisher putting out new female voices in french . A tough book about kids growing up in a harsh world .

The last brother by Nathacha Appanah

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Nathacha is an india born Mauritian writer she currently lives of the coast of Madagascar on a small island ,The last brother is her debut novel and in france won the FNAC fiction prize .she has written 3 other novels also winning prizes for blue bay palace ,see start as a journalist in her native Mauritius before in 98 going to france where she has worked in print media and radio .The last brother is set in the middle of the second world war we join Raj a young boy who has lost his brother distant from his hard-working father ,looking for friends and a way to deal with the loss of his brother meanwhile David arrives with 1500 Jews that have been deported from Palestine in their search for the promised land ,they arrive in Mauritius ,this is where Raj and David meet both have suffer loses and quickly they form a bond and become each others brothers so to speak ,David goes on the run from the prison camp ,where it happens Raj’s father is a guard the two boys escape through the tough swamps and landscape ,David not being in the best of health struggles .The book is a wonderfully poetic book and at just 200m pages long is what I call a weekend book one I read last saturday in a day ,Nathacha has done a great Job highlighting the plight of the people who didn’t make the promised land .

Then David made a very curious gesture .He plunged two fingers into the earth ,the laid them ,all covered in soil against his breast and ,his hand upon his beating heart said ERETZ .My mother began to weeping softly ,because she herself had probably understood that he was speaking of the promised land .

Raj sees how much the promised land means to David .

Told through Raj’s eyes you get a childlike view of the world where he is unconcerned with borders country’s and border ,just in his friend and brother David ,This book is one of the most touching books I ve read .The translation by Geoffrey Strachan is seamless as you’d expect from him .Raj and David will live with me for a long while ,the scenery of Mauritius as well .

I picture that blond child again ,his magnificent long jumping ,his good-natured face silhouetted against the sky and the foliage of the trees ,the red parakeet perched on his golden hair and I tell myself that in a minute I shall recount David’s story to my son ,so that he .too, may remember .

finis

the ending of the book !

If you’re looking for a powerful and thought provoking read instead of a supermarket holiday read I d put this on the top of your list !!!!!! .the book is in hard back FROM MACLEHOSE PRESS

LINKS –

PIECE ABOUT THE CHILDREN ON TRIP TO ERETZ