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A top francophone writer explores postcolonial amnesia in a long-overdue translation from Matt Reeck
Hailed by Milan Kundera as "an heir of Joyce and Kafka," Prix Goncourt winner Patrick Chamoiseau is among the leading Francophone writers today. With most of his novels having appeared in English, this book opens a new window on his oeuvre. A moving poetic essay that bears witness to the forgotten history of the French penal colony in French Guiana, French Guiana—Memory Traces of the Penal Colony accompanied by more than sixty evocative color photographs by Rodolphe Hammadi and translated, here for the first time, deftly by Matt Reeck.
Patrick Chamoiseau is an award-winning Francophone author from Martinique distinguished as a towering figure in the créolité movement. He is author of twelve novels, as well as several films and essays. His literary honors include the Prix Carbet and the Prix Goncourt. His novel Texaco was chosen as a New York Times notable book of the year. He lives in Martinique. Matt Reeck is the translator of five books, including Mirages of the Mind, selected as among the best translations of 2016 by Three Percent, and Bombay Stories, chosen by the New York Times as a 2014 editor's pick. He has won Fulbright, NEA, and PEN/Heim grants. Rodolphe Hammadi is an award-winning French photojournalist, photographer, and sculptor.
"Impossible writing: a translation that proceeds from the trace, but to where? This is writing that exceeds the function of beauty and becomes useful again, at the moment that it disappears. Patrick Chamoiseau's extraordinary practice is to develop the "memory traces" until they distend, creating a landscape of new sounds, sounds we do not hear but rather touch, in this beautiful translation, to English, by Matt Reeck."
~Bhanu Kapil
"Like Toni Morrison, Chamoiseau is attuned to the way those written out of the past haunt our present, troubling the official narrative. The writer detects the traces of French Guiana's past in everything, lapping at our heels like a restless sea."
~LA Review of Books