Eau de Cafe (Faber Caribbean Series) - Softcover

Confiant, Raphael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571195873 ISBN 13: 9780571195879

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 1999

Synopsis

The small fishing village of Grand-Anse, on the northern Atlanic coast of Martinique, has somehow been cursed by the arrival of a mysterious and desirable girl, Antilia. Since her arrival the sea has become barren and the village has turned its back on it. Only the narrator, intrigued by the girl and the sea, keeps his window open. The village becomes a bizarre place, where miracles occur alongside the everyday. At one point Antilia dies but is resurrected, only to die again. Much of the action revolves around the village rum-shop-cum-grocery kept by the narrator's god-mother, the eponymous Eau de Cafe, which provides a framework for a wide range of social vignettes of well-known Martinican types. The whole provides a vividly authentic picture of French Caribbean village life.

About this title

Review

In Eau de Cafe, his first novel to be translated into English, native Creole writer Raphael Confiant conjures an enrapturing portrait of 20th-century Martinican village society, steeped in earthy humour and lascivious mystery. Dealing with a period of mixed history, when French colonial rule is crawling to a close yet the psychic and social inheritance of slavery still shapes the lives of Grand-Anse's inhabitants, it is around the transcendently archetypal characters that the anecdotal and folkloric style of the writing coheres.

The narrator of most of the main sections of the novel begins as an adolescent boy, living in the rum shop of his godmother Eau de Café and fascinated by the ambiguous servant Antilia. A charged erotic presence of uncertain origin around whom the villagers weave superstitious stories, and whose naked dancing causes the priapic death of the local priest, the mystery of Antilia's appearance one day from the sea and subsequent departure thence or elsewhere haunts the narrator's life.

Returning from Paris after a decade or more's self-imposed exile, the latter sections of the novel deal with his patient quest for readmission to a culture which now brands him a troublemaker and his godmother a purveyor of "mumbo jumbo". An onlooker to the sport with which the villagers while away their days, he is reminded that "behind those tireless hands rolling the dice, there is real substance, a sort of furiousness. There's life and death, everything that you¹ve neglected in the past in favour of new horizons."

By turns erotic and comic, rumbustious and poetic, Confiant's prize-winning achievement here is remarkable, taking us into a world at once so immediate that you can smell the spilt rum on the floorboards yet so magical that you can glimpse the devil himself in the rising vapours. --Alex Butterworth

Synopsis

A novel which presents a picture of French Caribbean village life. Since the arrival of a mysterious and desirable girl, the sea has become barren and the fishing village of Grand-Anse has turned its back on it. Only the narrator, intrigued by the girl and the sea, keeps his window open.

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571195873
• ISBN 13: 9780571195879
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304