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#1107: Novel by J.S. Alexis : Vedrine comments and sends announcement
From: E Vedrine <evedrine@hotmail.com>
[Jacques Stephen Alexis: General Sun, My Brother
A Press Release :
General Sun, My Brother
"How exciting to have Jacques Stephen Alexis' masterpiece, Compère Général
Soleil, finally translated in English for a whole new generation of readers
to enjoy, question, and admire. This is another chance for all of us to
continue to celebrate this brave and timeless narrative remember this most
committed and enormously talented writer." (Edwidge Danticat, author of
Farming the Bones)
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
The first novel of the Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, General Sun,
My Brother appears here for the first time in English. Its depiction of the
nightmarish journey of the unskilled laborer Hilarion and his wife from the
slums of Port-au-Prince to the cane fields of the Dominican Republic has
brought comparisons to the work of Emile Zola, André Malraux, Richard
Wright, and Ernest Hemingway.
Alexis, whose mother was a descendant of the Revolutionary General
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, was already a mature thinker when he published
General Sun, My Brother (Compère Général Soleil) in France in 1955. A
militant Marxist himself, Alexis championed a form of the "marvelous
realism" developed by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, who called for a
vision of historical reality from the standpoint of slaves for whom the
supernatural was as much a part of everyday experience as were social and
other existential realities.
General Sun, My Brother opens as Hilarion is arrested for stealing a wallet
and imprisoned with an activist named Pierre Roumel-a fictional double for
the novelist Jacques Roumain--who schools him in the Marxist view of
history. On his release, Hilarion meets Claire-Heureuse and they settle down
together. Hilarion labors in sisal processing and mahogany polishing while
his partner sets up a small grocery store. After losing everything in a
criminally set fire, the couple joins the desperate emigration to the
Dominican Republic. Hilarion finds work as a sugarcane cutter, but the
workers soon become embroiled in a strike that ends in the "Dominican
Vespers," the 1937 massacre of Haitian workers by the Dominican army. The
novel personifies the sun as the ally, brother, and leader of the peasants.
Mortally wounded in crossing the Massacre River back into Haiti, Hilarion
urges Claire-Heureuse to remarry and to continue to work for a Haiti where
people can live in dignity and peace.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jacques Stephen Alexis had already gained international recognition for his
fiction when he returned to Haiti from Cuba in 1961 as part of a small
invasion force. He disappeared and presumably died at the
hands of Duvalier's Tontons Macoutes at the age of thirty-nine.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Carrol F. Coates is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the
State University of New York, Ninghamton. He has translated numerous books,
including The Festival of the Greasy Pole, by René
Depestre, and Dignity, by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, both published by the
University Press of Virginia in Charlottesville.
CARAF Books
Cloth ISBN 0-8139-1889-8
Paper ISBN 0-8139-1890-1 ]
Visit http://windowsonhaiti.com
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