From award-winning Tahitian author Titaua Peu comes Pina, a novel about a family torn apart by secrets and the legacy of colonialism, held together by nine-year-old Pina, a girl shouldering the weight of her family’s traumas.
Postcolonial family novels are a major mode of modern and contemporary fiction, ranging from Gabriel García Márquez's magical-realist classic One Hundred Years of Solitude to J. M. Coetzee's quiet, barbed Disgrace...Titaua Peu's Pina belongs to this tradition,but, crucially, it takes place not in a former colony but on Tahiti, in French Polynesia, where independence is an ongoing effort and debate...Peu evokes Tahiti with rough, unsentimental grace; Jeffrey Zuckerman, who has translated writing by French speakers from across the globe, translates chatty prose with force and fluidity...Pina itself is a fluid, sprawling novel, telling the freewheeling story of a Tahitian family whose 'fates go any which way, barely any detail in common'...Peu writes brutal scenes with wrenching immediacy, though she never lets the reader forget that the truest sources of violence in Pina are colonization and poverty...Ultimately, she maintains a tighter grasp on this idea than the plot, which moves so far and fast that it can be difficult to remain invested in the novel's events...Still, investing in its characters, Pina especially, is impossible to avoid.
Mohabir’s keen critique is part of a well-argued set-up for Peu’s unstinting, unflinching hammer-blow of a novel that reveals a country and a people struggling to confront the harsh reality of an abusive patriarchy and the brutal legacy of French colonialism ... Peu’s disdain for colonialism and for its ramifications is lacerating ... Stylistically, Peu prepares readers for the worst by parceling out, one couplet at a time, a haunting interstitial poem, and by delaying, via a noir-ish true-crime plot twist, the novel’s resolution, though things eventually end up on an almost discordantly cheerful upbeat. (Some may consider that a mild spoiler, but given the oppressive nature of the novel, a bit of encouragement never hurts.) Zuckerman’s translation is notably steady — in the very best sense of the word — employing frequently frank, even blunt, language for scene after scene that is freighted with emotion but related almost dispassionately for greater effect ... Peu paints a powerful picture of Tahitian society in Pina, but her imagery resonates far beyond the island’s shores and the book’s cover ... Most enduring of all, however, is Pina herself, a child whose young life is saddled with so much — too much — pain and sorrow.
This is a clamorous, at times unwieldy take on modern Tahiti, yet Peu’s 'rough-hewn, oral, humane prose' (in the words of the translator, Jeffrey Zuckerman) rings fiercely true.
