Maryse Conde Crossing the Mangrove.

Maryse Conde Crossing the Mangrove. Trans. Richard Philcox. recent York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1995. 208 pp $1095

Francisco Alvarez-Sanchez, a.k.a. Francis Sancher, the protagonist of Maryse Conde's novel Crossing the Mangrove, is a constant catalyst; he transforms the lives of those around him while he himself remains unchanged. Condo's novel, originally published in 1989 as Traversee de la Mangrove, explores the impact of the main character's mysterious arrival, life, and death forward the inhabitants of Riviere au Sel a small village in Guadeloupe. Sancher is a writer, and toward the [i]finale[/i] of the novel the reader finds public that the book he is working onward is also called Crossing the Mangrove. between the walls of reflexive irony like this and jests about writers throughout the novel, Conde explores the character of the writer in what Jamaica Kincaid calls "a small place." In a novel issue of Callaloo devoted to Conde's work, critic Lydie Moudileno make comments [i]or[/i] remarkss on artist characters in Conde's fiction, including Sancher: " Conde elaborates a method of representation such that onward the one hand the artist subserves to unveil the dynamic of [his] communit[y], while simultaneously revealing his inability to depict that community."

Conde's achievement, as the "real" writer, is to "represent that community," and the fictitious writer's place in it, in consequence of the subtle and elegant organization of the novel. The work begins with the discovery of Sancher's dead corpse and proceeds as a series of internal monologues (some alternating with the narrator's voice, any not) by those who attend his wake. Sancher himself at no time speaks, except in others' recollections. The monologues/vignettes come smoothly into one another and overlap, creating a multifaceted and sometimes contradictory portrait of Sancher and of the villagers. As the characters meditate upon their interactions with Sancher, many of them arrive at conclusions about and plans of action for their acknowledge lives. Mira Lameaulnes, one of the young women whom Sancher has impregnated, decides that her life will become a search for knowledge about her enigmatic lover Dinah Lameaulnes, Mira's stepmother and another of Sancher's lover decides to leave her husband and "look for the light and the air and the light for what's left of the years to live" (84)

The reflections of Lucien Evariste, nicknamed the Writer, and Emile Etienne, the Historian, illuminate the novel's disturb with Third World, small-town intellectuals and the elusive nature of history. Evariste is an idealistic young writer who has not now found a subject; when he hears that a writer, perhaps a revolutionary Cuban writer, has mov to Riviere au Sel he can barely contain his excitement. The pair become friends, and although Sancher has nothing to teach Evariste about the craft of writing by means of se, Evariste finds his motivation to write and the hero of his novel in the bodily form of Francis Sancher. Lucien decides to write about his now-dead friend, and to do in the same manner he must "check out the footprints he had left along the paths of life," "put himself in Sancher's shoes" (189) Emile Etienne, called "the Historian" since he compiled an oral history of neighboring Petit-Bourg, revives his determination to compile an oral history of the entire island of Guadeloupe. Sancher encouraged him in this scheme while he was alive, and his death pushes Etienne toward action, past his fear of again "being jeered at by the pedants" (198)

Etienne is also the confidante to whom Sancher has told greatest in number of his story. Sancher's great-great-great-grandfather was a white Guadeloupean planter curs by way of his slaves. This curse, Sancher believes, has l to the deaths of all the men in the family, unexplained deaths that always take place when the men are in their early fifties. He has answered to Guadeloupe to face this history and to die, ending the maledict by ending the family line. notwithstanding the Historian is unable to find any record that confirms the family documents Sancher carries, and he judges that Sancher has precipitated his avow death simply through his belief in the curse--in other words, that Sancher has frightened himself to death. The ambiguous nature of the afflict and the difficulty of ascertaining facts about slavery are important constituents in the novel. Even for those who want to transfer and face history, this feat is easier said than done. solitary in the final monologue, that of Xantippe, the antique loner who lives at the sharpness of the village, do we learn that "a crime was committed here, in succession this very spot, a drawn out long time ago" (204-05) and that Francis Sancher is conjoined to this crime, even although he does not know it. Sancher has been killed from his fear of a history he does not to the full understand.

The irony characteristic of CondO's work is apparent in this suggestion about Sancher's death and in many of the circumstances surrounding his brief life in Riviere au Sel although he identifies himself as a writer, no united reads what he has written; he may, in fact, have written nothing. admitting he is waiting for his avow death and trying to bring his supposedly curs family line to an last he impregnates two young women Conde calm gently mocks herself in the novel. Lucien Evariste can find no writers to talk to because "the small in number Guadeloupean writers who did exist worn out most of their time holding forth onward Caribbean culture in Los Angeles or Berkeley" (182); Conde taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for a number of years.