Slave Old Man conjures a metamorphosis of similar pathos and wonder ... Mr. Chamoiseau writes in a wild medley of French and Creole, sliding from dialect to classical expression like a freeform jazz musician. Linda Coverdale’s translation, the first in English, is gloriously unshackled, reveling in what she calls Mr. Chamoiseau’s 'fond disrespect for words' to forge innovative musical phrasings. The forest of world literature can be a bewildering place to navigate and one good trick is to find a translator you trust and follow her wherever she leads. Those who do so with Ms. Coverdale, one of the best French translators working, will discover such marvelous writers as Jean Echenoz, Emmanuel Carrère and Annie Ernaux. And they will come to this beautiful book, by a writer who’s as original as any I’ve read all year.
Imagine Walt Whitman adapting Apocalypto and you might approximate the awe and adrenaline of Chamoiseau’s action pastoral ... His exhilarating flight evokes the shock of freedom with tactile immediacy ... If the runaways of American literature seek autonomy and self-ownership, Chamoiseau’s maroon enters a 'Great Woods' where distinctions between past and present, human and animal, Old World and New dissolve ... Slave Old Man transpires in a solitude that can be limiting. Chamoiseau’s descriptions of the forest—beautifully translated from French and Creole by Linda Coverdale—are exhilarating, but the old man never quite comes into focus against the background of foliage and verbiage. A character without relationships or concrete memories, he risks becoming a cipher ... If the old man proves himself to anyone, it is his canine pursuer ... The sparks from their contest kindle this bonfire of a book, a maroon story written with 'a folktale parlance and a runner’s wind.'
Slave Old Man is Chamoiseau’s strongest work since his masterpiece, Texaco ... Slave Old Man is a cloudburst of a novel, swift and compressed — but every page pulses, blood-warm ... The prose is so electrifyingly synesthetic that, on more than one occasion, I found myself stopping to rub my eyes in disbelief.
Such poetic turns of phrase, rich with alliteration, are characteristic of the novel’s language. It is full of delightfully unexpected verbs ('He sent his body across dead stumps') and metaphors, such as 'chessboards of reverie' and 'vulva dark, carnal opacity.' The originality and musicality of phrases such as 'Gluey luminescence' are also a testament to Ms. Coverdale’s skill ... At not much more than 100 pages, this is a nightmarish novella that alternates between feeling like a nebulous allegory and a realistic escaped slave narrative. It can be a disorienting experience: like the slave, readers are trapped in a menacing forest and prone to hallucinations ... The lyricism of the writing and the brief glimpse back from the present day, in which an anthropologist discovers the slave’s remains and imagines the runaway back into life, give this book enduring power.
Passages rich with imagery and music, occasionally flecked with vivid creole vernacular, can be plucked from any paragraph on any page. One can’t help but wonder why it took so long for this treasure to be translated into English. But it is here now, and the world Chamoiseau creates through the eyes of this aging runaway reveals the enduring cruelty of bondage and the endless creativity of its survivors and their descendants.
...[a] heart-pounding novel from Chamoiseau, Martinique’s great chronicler of the atrocity of Caribbean slavery ... Chamoiseau’s prose is astounding in its beauty—and is notable for its blending of French and Creole—and he ups the stakes by making this novel a breathtaking thriller, as well.
