Self-Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances and Reflections
Savane Mulet is the nominal landscape of this stream-of-consciousness-influenced novel that inhabits a dreamscape more than any particular town on Guadeloupe in the West Indies, where the great 1928 cyclone traumatized Eliette, then eight. Now Hurricane Hugo, whose force and violence unlock repressed memories of grief and loss, bookends Eliette's life. In the interim, a Haitian woman prophesied a girl child for Eliette, but pregnancy never was part of her life, though she so yearned for a child that she broke with her first husband and married a 50-year-old docker who, sadly, proved "inoperative in action" and then died, leaving her doubly embittered, alone in her cabin. Then in Eliette's tropical world of superstition, passions, and forces of nature, energies interlock when the golden jewelry of a woman named Esabelle seemingly brings a heaviness into the air that cracks the sky and leads to murder. Pineau's liquid flow of images, chronological leaps, and varied points of view add up to a treasurable experience for those who stay with it.Whitney ScottCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.