Texaco
Subtitle: A Novel
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: February 11, 1997
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 401
ISBN-13: 9780679432357
Subjects: Modern fiction; French (Language) Contemporary Fiction; Fiction; Non-Classifiable; Caribbean Area; Historical fiction; Martinique; Women planners
Description: Of black Martinican provenance, Patrick Chamoiseau gives us Texaco (winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize), an international literary achievement, tracing one hundred and fifty years of post-slavery Caribbean history: a novel that is as much about self-affirmation engendered by memory as it is about a quest for the adequacy of its own form.

In a narrative composed of short sequences, each recounting episodes or developments of moment, and interspersed with extracts from fictive notebooks and from statements by an urban planner, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the saucy, aging daughter of a slave affranchised by his master, tells the story of the tormented foundation of her people's identity. The shantytown established by Marie-Sophie is menaced from without by hostile landowners and from within by the volatility of its own provisional state.

Hers is a brilliant polyphonic rendering of individual stories informed by rhythmic orality and subversive humor that shape a collective experience.