The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

Caribbean

With its many dispersed islands and languages, the literary world of the Caribbean—extending to the Dutch-, French-, and English-speaking outliers of South America (Suriname, French Guiana, and Guyana)—is an enormous hodgepodge. Although Cuban literature is a significant part of the Latin American tradition, until recently the country’s isolation from the United States has led to a relatively muted reception of Cuban fiction in the English-speaking world. Despite some sense of community in the Caribbean, fostered by regional publishers and organizations, its linguistic, cultural, and economic differences—in some instances, as in the case of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, all even on the same island—have limited the rise of a more unified literary marketplace. With only a small local base of readers, an underdeveloped publishing market that often can offer only little editorial support, and few venues providing useful critical feedback, a healthy literary culture has been difficult to sustain in most of the Caribbean nations. Not surprisingly, many authors from the island states are best known for their work created abroad, most famously the Trinidad and Tobago–born Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul (b. 1932).

CUBA

Cuba’s experience with authoritarian rule is not unusual in Latin America but has, under Fidel Castro and now his brother Raúl, lasted longer and been more stable than elsewhere. The totalitarian regime that took power in 1959 continues to limit freedom of speech, but as in the Soviet Union, a high regard for culture has provided fertile ground for authors, and the literary output by those in Cuba itself and writers who have gone abroad has consistently been impressive.

Cuba’s greatest novelist, Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980), spent much of his life abroad. A dedicated leftist, he fled the country in 1928 after being blacklisted and spent most of the next decades in Europe and Venezuela before settling in Cuba again after the revolution in 1959. Despite a comfortable and privileged life in Cuba under the Castro regime, he accepted a diplomatic posting to Paris in the late 1960s and lived there until his death. Carpentier’s fiction is a fascinating amalgam of his cultural and political influences. He also frequently relied on music for his fiction, most obviously in the grand Stravinsky-suffused La consagración de la primavera (The Rite of Spring; 1978, not yet translated).

Carpentier is perhaps best known as the originator of what is now known as magical realism. This was not a term he himself used but was taken from the notion of lo real maravilloso (the marvelously real), which he described in conjunction with his novel The Kingdom of This World (1949, English 1957). In The Kingdom of This World, Carpentier examines the transition from colonial French to local rule in Haiti at the turn of the eighteenth century through the Haitian revolution and its messy aftermath in which the regime of Henri Christophe (the black self-proclaimed king of the northern part of the new nation) proved to be as delusional as that of the Europeans. The four short parts of The Kingdom of This World offer a fragmented view of this period of Haitian history. Ti Noël is a unifying figure across the different sections. He starts out as a slave, and like most Haitians, his lot is little improved by the political changes. It is Carpentier’s embrace of what he saw as “the marvelously real” that is the novel’s most striking feature, with its reliance on native Haitian custom, including voodoo, in an eerily dreamy presentation verging on the surreal. Explosion in a Cathedral (1962, English 1963) broadens the themes of The Kingdom of This World. Taking place during the French Revolution, the novel is a more expansive examination of how these transformations affected the Old and New Worlds.

Carpentier’s most acclaimed work, The Lost Steps (1953, English 1956), offers a more radical contrast of civilizations. In this novel, a composer living in a large city in the United States who has more or less sold out to commercial interests takes up an offer to travel to the isolated backlands of South America to collect musical instruments used by the indigenous population. There he finds a culture still largely existing outside history. Its simplicity and purity attract him, but in his attempt to capture his experience in a musical composition, he leaves it. Then, after returning to civilization, he cannot find his way back. The Lost Steps is a fascinating allegory of the artist in the modern world.

Though best known as a poet, José Lezama Lima (1910–1976) wrote one of the great novels of Cuba, Paradiso (1966, English 1974). More than simply a coming-of-age novel, it artfully traces protagonist José Cemí’s maturation into a poet. Sexually charged and explicit, and with its baroque evocation of old and contemporary Cuba as well as its immersion into the poetic, Paradiso is a challenging but rewarding work.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s (1929–2005) fiction is among the most comic to come out of Latin America. The wordplay and puns in his novels of pre-Castro Cuba, such as Three Trapped Tigers (1965, English 1971) and Infante’s Inferno (1979, English 1984), are very difficult to translate. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) is one of the most obvious and strongest influences on his work (right down to the use of entirely blacked-out pages). Fluent in English, Cabrera Infante collaborated on the English versions of Three Trapped Tigers and Infante’s Inferno; both are re-creations rather than strict translations. Appropriately, Three Trapped Tigers begins with a master of ceremonies’ bilingual introduction to the show to come, just as might have been heard in the 1950s on many of Havana’s nightclub stages catering to both local and U.S. audiences. Speech and conversation continue to dominate in the work, with multiple perspectives and many voices, but the novel also uses letters and even texts on the death of Leon Trotsky, written as a parody of seven of Cuba’s best known authors (including José Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier). Infante’s Inferno is a comingof-age novel that deals with sexual awakening and obsession even more intently than does Lezama Lima’s Paradiso.

José Manuel Prieto (b. 1962) left Cuba after high school to spend more than a decade in the Soviet Union before moving to Mexico in the mid-1990s, and his books reflect some of those international experiences. His trilogy of novels with Russian themes, Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia (1997, English 2013), Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire (1999, English 2000), and Rex (2007, English 2009), are exciting works with flighty narrators who get caught up in shady business dealings, and they are strongly rooted in other works of modern fiction. Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire and Rex build on Nabokov, Borges, and Proust. The narrator in Rex is obsessed by Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, to which he refers as “the Book.” Hired as a tutor for a young Russian boy, he relies on it as an all-encompassing textbook. In Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire the narrator, J., reflects on his life as a smuggler. Among the objects he pursued and wanted to bring across international borders were both rare butterflies and V., a prostitute with whom he had fallen passionately in love. The novel follows his attempts to frame a perfect letter to V., who has escaped his grasp, adding a literary dimension to his story. Prieto’s novels might seem too allusive, but the underlying stories of international intrigue and personal quests make them better than most such referential fiction.

Leonardo Padura Fuentes (b. 1955) is among the few internationally recognized and successful authors who have remained in Cuba. Six of his crime novels featuring Mario Conde have been translated into English, and they offer a surprisingly unvarnished picture of contemporary Cuba. Conde was introduced as a policeman with literary aspirations in a quartet of novels covering a year at the end of the 1980s in Conde’s life, each of the four volumes devoted to a different season and crime: Havana Blue (1991, English 2007), Havana Gold (1994, English 2008), Havana Red (1997, English 2005), and Havana Black (1998, English 2006). In the later volumes, Adiós Hemingway (2001, English 2005) and Havana Fever (2005, English 2008), the middle-aged Conde has retired from his job and works as a middleman in the used-book trade but again finds himself caught up in detective work. While all these novels are solid and satisfying police procedurals, their greater appeal is Conde’s descriptions of a country that seems to be all faded glory.

In a more ambitious work, The Man Who Loved Dogs (2009, English 2014), Padura revisits the assassination of Leon Trotsky. This three-tiered novel recounts the stories of Trotsky; his assassin, Ramón Mercader; and a once-promising Cuban writer, Iván Cárdenas Maturell, who went too far in challenging the authorities with a story he wrote.

KEEP IN MIND

• Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990) wrote challenging but rewarding fiction.

• Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s (b. 1950) Dirty Havana Trilogy (1998, English 2001) is a vivid depiction of the misery in 1990s Havana.

• Among Zoé Valdés’s (b. 1959) noteworthy novels is the lively I Gave You All I Had (1996, English 1999).

• Antonio José Ponte’s (b. 1964) collections of short stories include Tales from the Cuban Empire (2000, English 2002).

• Uruguayan-born Daniel Chavarría (b. 1933) has lived in Cuba since 1969. He shows a lighter, more humorous touch than does Leonardo Padura in his thrillers set in Havana, Adiós Muchachos (1994, English 2001) and Tango for a Torturer (2001, English 2007). This classics scholar has also written The Eye of Cybele (1993, English 2002), set in ancient Greece.

OTHER SPANISH-SPEAKING NATIONS AND TERRITORIES

Much of the literature available in English by writers from the other major Spanish-speaking nations and territories in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico (a territory of the United States), reflects their close connection to the United States. A growing number of acclaimed U.S.-based English-writing authors have Puerto Rican or Dominican ties, including Julia Alvarez (b. 1950) and Junot Díaz (b. 1968), both of whom spent parts of their earliest childhood in the Dominican Republic and use their family and cultural backgrounds in their fiction.

The Cuban-born Mayra Montero (b. 1952) is the most significant and sure-handed contemporary Puerto Rico–based author. With a novel of Haiti that echoes the work of Alejo Carpentier, In the Palm of Darkness (1995, English 1997), and other novels such as Last Night I Spent with You (1991, English 2000), her fiction also is oriented to the larger Caribbean region. Her novels often have an erotic tinge, and the most salacious, Deep Purple (2000, English 2003), is also wonderfully comic. In that novel, music critic Agustín Cabán finds he is not quite ready for retirement and keeps busy by writing his erotic memoirs in installments. Here Montero combines two of her favorite themes, music and sex, and Cabán’s various sexual conquests offer appealing erotic entertainment.

Old Cuba also features in several of Montero’s novels. The Messenger (1998, English 1999) is based on a historic event, the explosion of a bomb in a Havana theater during Enrico Caruso’s 1920 performance of Aida. Dancing to “Almendra” (2005, English 2007) is set in the late 1950s and begins with the death of a hippopotamus that had escaped the Havana zoo and the murder of a mafioso in New York, two separate violent deaths that turn out to be connected. The young journalist who pursues the story, Joaquín Porrata, finds himself drawn into a complex and dangerous tangle of events that involve both Havana’s strong Mafia influence and the revolution. Although Montero overdoes the bizarre—Porrata’s love interest is a one-armed circus performer calling herself Yolanda, and she is far from the only colorful character—she spins a tale of intrigue and historic ambience.

FRANCOPHONE CARIBBEAN

The Caribbean’s French-speaking nations and territories stretch from Haiti to French Guiana. The so-called overseas departments, including Martinique and French Guiana, are still officially parts of France and remain closely tied to it, which is reflected in much of the literary production there. Haiti was the first Latin American colony to gain independence, during the French Revolution, and its cultural development has followed a very different arc, which has repeatedly been stunted by extended periods of political instability and militant authoritarian rule. Creole (Kreyòl) is, along with French, Haiti’s official language, and even though most of the Haitian fiction that reaches an international audience—mainly in France but also in English translation—is written in French, much of it has Creole influences.

René Philoctète’s (1932–1995) Massacre River (1989, English 2005) explores the infamous 1937 massacre ordered by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in the border region dividing Haiti from the Dominican Republic. The protagonists are the Dominican Pedro Brito and his Haitian wife, Adèle, caught up in the events, but Trujillo also figures in the novel. In scenes that shift between the real and the surreal, the poet Philoctète vividly portrays the madness of the times. Language plays a central role in the massacre, with a quick test of the Spanish pronunciation of the word for parsley (perejil) determining who is to be spared and who is to be killed, in the absence of any other means of differentiating between the nationalities of those in the area. Philoctète’s extensive use of a mix of French, Spanish, and Creole reflects the communal attitude of the locals that readily transcends nationalist fervor. It is the outsiders, led by the authoritarian Trujillo, who seek to impose notions of difference and racial superiority where there are none.

Lyonel Trouillot’s (b. 1956) compact novel Street of Lost Footsteps (1996, English 2003) compresses Haiti’s violent history into an account of a single brutal night in a dark ride reminiscent of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961). Trouillot’s dense yet lyrical style can be difficult to fully appreciate in translation, but he is an important author who should make a larger mark as more of his work becomes available in English.

Martiniquais author Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) was a highly influential critic and intellectual and a major poet. He also wrote several novels, including The Fourth Century (1964, English 2001) and The Overseer’s Cabin (1981, revised 1997, English 2011), both of which tell the often violent and dark history of the island, with an emphasis on voices and stories that have long been lost or overlooked.

Another author from Martinique, Patrick Chamoiseau (b. 1953), is among the region’s most innovative. His use of Creole in his French texts is particularly noteworthy, as he is less concerned with authentically representing local speech than with the new puns and different formulations that Creole offers. The wonderful Solibo Magnificent (1988, English 1998) is nominally a mystery, but the investigation into the death of its storytelling title character is also an allegory of the demise of the local oral tradition. From the crisp precision of the police incident report that opens the novel to the freewheeling dialogue, Chamoiseau’s narrative is an often amusing flood of miscommunication as the different ways of telling stories and conveying information clash. The enormous Texaco (1992, English 1997) is a beautiful panoramic novel covering more than a century of the history of Martinique in which Chamoiseau employs his trademark approaches to good effect.

ANGLOPHONE CARIBBEAN

The British West Indies extend from Bermuda to Guyana, and while interesting fiction has been produced across the entire region, much of the best has emerged from Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. Many authors have moved throughout the region as well as farther abroad, with the Nobel Prize–winning poet Derek Walcott (b. 1930)—who was born in St. Lucia, studied in Jamaica, and worked in Trinidad and the United States—being typical. Several of the region’s countries also have sizable populations with roots in the Indian subcontinent, producing a different cultural mix than that elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere.

V. S. Naipaul (b. 1932) left Trinidad to study at Oxford and then settled in England, and his novels, set in the Caribbean, Africa, India, and England, reflect his international background and experience. Naipaul’s characters often find themselves strangers in strange lands, the colonial legacy skewing worlds in which his characters cannot find a proper hold. Several of his works feature would-be revolutionaries, but at best, his protagonists are drawn into the action as inadvertent followers and witnesses, not leaders. Despite a surprisingly sure comic touch and some genuinely humane humor, Naipaul’s fiction is often bleak and sour. However, his supremely elegant style—one of the finest of any contemporary author writing in English—and penetrating character studies redeem most of the faults in his fiction.

A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) is the longest but also one of the simplest and most generous of Naipaul’s novels. The title character, Mohun Biswas, is loosely based on Naipaul’s own father, and the novel describes how he stumbles through life (and into his marriage). Mr. Biswas clings to the ambition of owning his own house, a symbol of what otherwise eludes him: accomplishment and independence. After numerous failed attempts, he finally meets with success, yet what Naipaul allows him looks like only a hollow victory. The overwhelmed protagonist of this tragicomic story is typical of Naipaul’s fiction, but the attentive portrait of him is also a particularly warm one.

Naipaul offers grim portrayals of the postcolonial world in politically charged novels such as Guerrillas (1975), set in the West Indies, and A Bend in the River (1979), set in Africa. Here, as elsewhere in his work, Naipaul is not nihilistic or simply cynical—except regarding those characters who claim to be able to orchestrate social and political change—but he ruthlessly deflates almost any idealism his characters might harbor. The two novels about Willie Somerset Chandran are the most compelling late-career synthesis of Naipaul’s outlook on life and the world. Half a Life (2001), a novel of half-lived lives and incompleteness, portrays Willie as he drifts from India to England to Africa to Berlin. One of Willie’s failures is his halfhearted attempt at becoming an author, and part of the book’s power comes from the fact that his fate seems to be one that Naipaul could have envisaged for himself. Naipaul’s cool and controlled account of Willie’s life continues in Magic Seeds (2004), a summation of Naipaul’s worldview presented in spare prose. In Magic Seeds, Willie seeks to make his life whole by joining a guerrilla movement in India but finds no radical redemption. Magic Seeds is a devastating, pitch-perfect meditation on contemporary anomie.

The entire range of Naipaul’s fiction is worthwhile, but among his other works deserving closer attention are two with strong autobiographical elements: A Way in the World (1994)—called a “novel” in the American edition and a “sequence” in the British edition—and The Enigma of Arrival (1987). Naipaul’s superb (if often frustratingly opinionated) nonfiction is also reflected in these close-to-life novels.

The leading Guyanese authors Roy Heath (1926–2008) and Wilson Harris (b. 1921) emigrated to England in the 1950s, but much of their work is set in Guyana. Heath’s The Murderer (1978) is a penetrating psychological study of a man driven to kill his wife. In the comic novels Kwaku (1982) and The Ministry of Hope (1997), the misadventures of Kwaku Cholmondeley, first in the countryside and then in the city, offer an entertaining overview of Guyanese society, life, and political corruption. Wilson Harris’s novels range more widely across Guyana and also are more stylistically varied; his writing career also had several distinct phases. Much of his fiction is experimental and his narratives are often nonlinear, but it also has connections, as characters and themes appear again in later novels. None of his many novels can be considered representative, but Resurrection at Sorrow Hill (1993), about the residents of an asylum in the depths of the Guyanese jungle, with its reworking of both European and indigenous myths and the use of both simplistic allegory (characters with names like Christopher D’eath) and philosophical argument subtly woven into the narrative, serves as an excellent introduction to his work. Harris is also one of several authors who has written about the 1978 mass suicide of more than nine hundred followers of Jim Jones in Jonestown, in his novel Jonestown (1996). Fred D’Aguiar (b. 1960) also wrote about these events in his narrative poem Bill of Rights (1998).

KEEP IN MIND

• V. S. Naipaul’s younger brother, Shiva Naipaul (1945–1985; emigrated to Great Britain), and their nephew Neil Bissoondath (b. 1955; emigrated to Canada) also wrote fiction.

• Trinidadian author Earl Lovelace’s (b. 1935) Is Just a Movie (2011) is a novel of late-twentieth-century life in Trinidad.

• Jamaican author Marlon James’s (b. 1970) rich novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) deservedly won the Man Booker Prize.

• The writer Caryl Phillips (b. 1958) was born on St. Kitts but raised in Great Britain. Several of his books are about different forms of the African diaspora.

DUTCH-SPEAKING NATIONS AND TERRITORIES

Dutch is the official language of the Caribbean’s Netherland Antilles, as well as the South American nation of Suriname. Only Suriname is large enough to have developed a modestly self-sustaining domestic literary culture, though some of its writers, like Astrid Roemer (b. 1947), emigrated to the Netherlands. Cynthia McLeod (b. 1936) is the most prominent local author whose work is available in English. Her novel The Free Negress Elisabeth (2000, English 2004) is a fascinating historical work based on the eighteenth-century figure Elizabeth Samson, who attained considerable wealth and social standing, even though she was barred from marrying a white man.