Tall Is Her Body
Robert de la Chevotiere
Belletristik/Erzählende Literatur
Beschreibung
A sweeping, multicultural family story of keen observation and the supernatural in which one man’s journey to wholeness against the collapse of the West Indies’ banana industry during the 1990s reflects the lasting impacts of colonialism, Catholicism, and immigration.
Before the gadèt-zafè came to warn his mother she would die, six-year-old Fidel knew only the everyday mystery of the Guadeloupe around him. The lush greenery, the dusty roads, the sugar cane growing and the neighbors arguing, the push and pull of love and resentment between people who rely on each other—his world is small but full. Until a few moments of violence change his life forever.
Orphaned, Fidel returns to his mother’s native Dominica and whirls from one relative and reality to another, learning pieces of his own story. His heritage is one of layered secrets and sharp divisions—between the grandmothers who love him and the aunt who wants him dead, the Catholic orthodoxy of his school and the Obeah knowledge of his grandfather, and the indigenous and the colonial. The violence he’s witnessed inhabits not only strangers but himself. The spirits of the dead visit him with advice, threats, and explanations. And when he sees a path toward happiness in Canada, he must reconcile his intense, bittersweet love of his home with the possibility of leaving it.
Kundenbewertungen
1990s Caribbean, Canadian immigration, masculinity, caribbean literature, coming-of-age, colonialism, dominica, magical realism mystery, magical realism Caribbean, coming of age, tropical fiction, obeah, west indies, magical realism mature romance, modern Caribbean fiction, immigrant stories, modern historical fiction, plantations, fiction of immigration, bildungsroman, nontraditional childrearing fiction, Black ghost stories, Commonwealth of Dominica, 1990s historical fiction, African diaspora magic, 1990s magical realism, manhood, chiquita, dole, magical realism, postcolonial literature, canadian author, equatorial fiction, family drama, banana wars fiction, ghost stories, modern Caribbean historical fiction, family mystery, modern Caribbean magical realism, equatorial stories, French Colonial fiction, banana, christianity, family secrets, African diaspora fiction, family drama magical realism, catholicism, Guadeloupe fiction, Caribbean fiction, spirits, banana wars, morally gray, historical fiction, afro-caribbean, Caribbean anticolonial fiction, anticolonial fiction, immigrant magical realism, magical realism murder, generational trauma