Eve Out of Her Ruins - by Ananda Devi (Paperback)

About the Book

A harrowing account of the hidden violent reality of life in her native country by the figurehead of Mauritian literature.

Book Synopsis

A harrowing account of the hidden violent reality of life in her native country by the figurehead of Mauritian literature.

Review Quotes

"One of Devi and Zuckerman's greatest triumphs in this book is that each character has their own distinct rhythms, with power and poetry drawn from the cadences of their speech... It could be a manifesto for reading translated fiction, and this stunning short novel is a perfect starting point." -- Deborah Smith, The Guardian

"The beauty of Devi's prose belies the horror of the world she conjures up. This is a visceral portrait of violence rendered honestly and gracefully." -- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Eve Out of Her Ruins is a spare, traumatic and enriching novel, newly and superbly translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman... Her characters emerge from the page with arresting immediacy and startling vividness. This is a novel that can take you to fathomless depths." -- Matthew Adams, The National

"Zuckerman's translation is artful... While descriptive, the sparse language adds to the sense of hopelessness and the scarcity in which the characters live." -- Hannah Wise, Dallas Morning News

"The most vivid novel I've read in ages, magnificently translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman. The gorgeous, profoundly poetic writing is completely mesmerizing and viscerally affecting." -- Jennifer Croft, BTBA 2017 Judge

"The desolate, poor, and often-violent lives of the island's inhabitants are exposed in the stark and lyrical prose of Ananda Devi's brief and revealing novel... Devi's trenchant yet terse prose perfectly captures the lives of these sad and forgotten outcasts from this small island nation." -- Melissa Beck, World Literature Today

"A remarkable book that is as much a call to action as it is a love story, Devi beautifully juxtaposes the beauty and despair of the island through her dreamy, ethereal prose, and the audacity of her characters' ambition." -- Laura Farmer, Cedar Rapids Gazette

"Eve's coping, her delicious revenge and small acts of goodness by other characters give the translation a hopeful tone. Eve sidesteps poverty and abuse -- the true antagonists in the novel -- and Devi's poetic writing provides portraits of characters who force their own bodies into mattering." -- Allison Cundiff, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"In this heartbreaking lightning-paced novel, Ananda Devi burns down all of the colonialist stereotypes surrounding the island, instead depicting a place that has been devastated by history and anguish." -- Adam Hocker, Staff Pick at Albertine Books

"A story that stays with the reader long after it's read." -- Michael Barron, The Culture Trip

"a novel of conversations, emotions, aspirations, and setbacks... This is a novel of haunting language with a powerful message about gender and violence." -- Terry Pitts, Vertigo

"Devi's powerful novel has stuck with me weeks after finishing and Zuckerman's lively translation captures the intensity of the daily struggle for life the teens face." -- Caitlin Baker, Seattle City Literature

"Zuckerman's translation is confident and accomplished, capturing the marine clarity of the prose without losing any of its poetic heat." -- Anjuli Raza Kolb, Bookforum

"[Eve's] journey, harrowing and doomed as it may be, is described with unforgettable poetry and power." --Willard Manus, Lively Arts

"This slim volume is such a harrowing experience, some may balk at continuing once the fate of the titular Eve becomes clear... If one of [translator Jeffrey Zuckerman's] key objectives was to retain the spare poetry of her native prose, he has triumphed. For while the events that take place against a stark backdrop

About the Author

Ananda Devi was born in 1957 in Trois-Boutiques, Mauritius, an island notable for its confluence of diverse ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identities. She studied ethnology and anthropology, and completed a doctoral thesis at SOAS in London. After several years in the Congo, she moved to Switzerland in 1989. She has published eleven novels as well as short stories and poetry over her entire career. Eve Out of Her Ruins, originally published by the prestigious Gallimard publishing house in France in 2006, was an enormous critical and popular success, winning the Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie for the best novel of the year written in French, previously won by such writers as Alain Mabanckou and Mathias Enard. She was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 2010. Her first novel in English, Indian Tango, was published by Host Publications in 2011. Devi has participated in numerous literary festivals in the US, Europe, and India, and her works have been translated into numerous languages.

Jeffrey Zuckerman is Digital Editor at Music & Literature magazine and a translator from French. He has served on the 2016 jury for the PEN Translation Prize, and his translation of Antoine Volodine's Radiant Terminus is forthcoming from Open Letter Books in 2017. His writing and translations have appeared in Best European Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Paris Review Daily, the New Republic, and VICE.

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was born in 1940 in Nice, France, but both parents had strong family connections with the former French colony of Mauritius. He is president and long-standing member of the prize jury for the Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie (awarded to Ananda Devi's Eve Out of Her Ruins in 2006), and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008.