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Fiction. Literature. HTML: LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOKS of 2021 By the winner of the 2018 Alternative Nobel Prize in Literature "At once touching and devastating, the book explores the effects of loss and grief on a personal, communal, and national level, but does so with a personal voice that feels more like a having a conversation than reading a book...it is a novel that cements Cond� as a literary giant who beautifully chronicles the humanity found in some of the most violent places in the world." �GABINO IGLESIAS, NPRBabakar is a doctor living alone, with only the memories of his childhood in Mali. In his dreams, he receives visits from his blue-eyed mother and his ex-lover Azelia, both now gone, as are the hopes and aspirations he's carried with him since his arrival in Guadeloupe. Until, one day, the child Ana�s comes into his life, forcing him to abandon his solitude. Ana�s's Haitian mother died in childbirth, leaving her daughter destitute�now Babakar is all she has, and he wants to offer this little girl a future. Together they fly to Haiti, a beautiful, mysterious island plagued by violence, government corruption, and rebellion. Once there, Babakar and his two friends, the Haitian Movar and the Palestinian Fouad, three different identities looking for a more compassionate world, begin a desperate search for Ana�s's family.… (more)
User reviews
Babakar Traore is a Malian currently living in Guadeloupe haunted by his mother appearing in his dreams.
Once again Maryse Conde affirms herself as a consummate storyteller. It is through the background stories of the characters looking at the delicate interior conflicts that haunt each of them that we understand displacement and exiles that is necessary due to political/ethnic conflicts, climate disasters, and lingering effects of colonialism that are done for the sake of survival.
Conde successfully integrates the past and present histories of the stateless men so their desperate search for Anais’s family exposes the richness and depth beyond the obvious of one’s ordinary life.
Kudos to the translator Richard Philcox for his skilled translation and providing the nuanced aspects of the diverse cultures/languages as the locales of the book changes between Mali, Guadeloupe, Lebanon, and Haiti.
Overall, this is an entertaining and informative read with themes of sanctity of friendship, the power of love, and the complicated nature of family that lifted my spirits and renewed my hope at this time of such division in the world.
Thanks to GoodReads and the publisher for providing a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
Condé can tell a story. This novel features stories within the story as we learn about different characters' backgrounds. I
This is also another novel about trauma and war. In a fictional west African country (not Mali, or Senegal, or Ghana, with named fictional cities). In Lebanon. In Haiti. And about life and grief, in Mali, in Guadeloupe, in Haiti. It is about race/color, national origin, class--and how each affects the other and how one might be accepted in a particular place and by whom.
And it is about love and friendship--how Babakar, widowed in Africa, moved to his much-loved late mother's home of Guadeloupe. A skilled obstetrician, he holds few friends close--and those he does tend to die of trauma or old age. But he keeps on, saving mothers and babies, and then claiming one orphan for his own.