La Belle Creole
She has a rather rich track record, and yet the great lady of West Indian literature Maryse Condé is little known in Quebec. Born in Guadeloupe in 1937, she lived in Africa, then moved to Paris with her four children, leaving France shortly after graduating for the United States, where in 1985 she founded the Center for French and Francophone Studies. from Columbia University (where she still has her chair). She comes to us today with her fourteenth novel, among an abundant work that also includes plays, short stories, children’s books, several anthologies of West Indian literature, and a number of articles and essays dealing in particular with the cultural identity. Impressive? A little. But above all the essentials, which in this case transpire from the pages of La Belle Creole , and which sets great writers like Maryse Condé apart from others: the singularity of a writing combining, in her case, French and Creole, and combining efficiency and poetry as if their cohabitation had never been otherwise than Obvious. La Belle Creole tells all in quiet back and forth in time the story of a young black man called Dieudonné, from whom we learn at the beginning of the novel that he has just been, somewhat miraculously, acquitted of the murder of the white mistress with whom he was employed as a gardener. The mystery reigns almost throughout the stories on the circumstances of the death of Loraine, extremely wealthy alcoholic to whom Dieudonne would have offered everything, had he still possessed something precious in this city of Port-Mahault agitated by racial conflicts and social, and where its only joys belong to the past. The story unveiled by Maryse Condé will not be complicated. Calling on various characters, evolving as well in the forums of politics as in those of the family, and showing conflicts of race as much as of sex, La Belle Creole will gradually stage a series of missed appointments with love. From the most elementary affection of a parent, to the most laudable devotion of a friend, and even the burning passion of love, all the actors seem to have to suffer lack. Only the reader wins. Easily.