Blessed is the Fruit (Faber Caribbean Series) - Softcover

Antoni, Robert

4

26 ratings by Goodreads

9780571195374: Blessed is the Fruit (Faber Caribbean Series)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571195377 ISBN 13: 9780571195374

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1998

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A novel which describes the relationship between two 33-year-old West Indian women: Lilla, white mistress of a rotting, once-grand colonial mansion, and her servant Vel. Lilla has been abandoned by her husband, and Vel is pregnant. The pair tell readers the story of their lives.

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Review:

Do you enjoy rich, lyrical narrative prose laced with the sensuality and lore of the Caribbean? Consider Robert Antoni's description of eating a mango: "[M]angoes can only be properly eaten sitting in waist-deep water.... Using our teeth to rip off hurriedly the long chamois-strips of bright red skin, floating away on the crystal water. Sinking our teeth into smooth, orange flesh the texture of human flesh.... Juice sticky running down our chins, necks, our breasts--awful, wonderful! Sucking the sweet, hairy seeds with all the life left in us. Till we've nothing remaining in our puffed, puckered cheeks but a couple of dry, hollow kneecap-bones." Based on this passage, you'd never guess that Antoni's novel opens quite horribly, with a failed abortion attempt.

Blessed Is the Fruit begins in the bedroom. Two women lie next to each other in bed--one white, the other black. One describes, in a relieved but stunned voice, the sleeping, wounded body of the other; this voice belongs, as does the bed, to Mrs Lilla Woodward, "Mistress Lil", owner of a dilapidated estate on a post-colonial Caribbean island. Velma Clarine Downs Bootman, Lilla's servant of 10 years, is the woman beside her.

In the aftermath of the failed abortion, memories surface and individual histories unfold as the barriers of race and class are shattered. Antoni's language, particularly when vocalized by Vel, is rich in cadence and metaphor. The unborn child is cradled by the contrasting voices of these two women who manage to bridge their very different worlds.

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