About this item
Highlights
- An award-winning, lyrically written, beautifully haunting saga of a Haitian family's fight against a curse spanning four generations.
- About the Author: Yanick Lahens was born in Port-au-Prince in 1953.
- 216 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
About the Book
"Winner of the 2014 Prix Femina + 2015 French Voices Award"--Back cover.Book Synopsis
An award-winning, lyrically written, beautifully haunting saga of a Haitian family's fight against a curse spanning four generations.Review Quotes
Winner of the Prix Femina, 2014 Winner of a French Voices Award, 2015 "A remarkable accomplishment." - Asymptote
"Yanick Lahens adeptly dipped her pen nib in tears to write Moonbath. She brandished her writing instrument with dexterity, creating Cétoute as a metaphor symbolizing both the pain and the promise of Haiti." - Lanie Tankard, The Woven Tale Press
"In the Haitian tradition of the rural novel [...] Yanick Lahens' Moonbath establishes itself by its grand and lucid beauty." - Le Point
"Lahens's ambitious fresco of twentieth-century Haiti through the eyes of peasants depicts the first generation with Romain-like incision." - Robert H. McCormick Jr, World Literature Today
"Lahens is the most important living female Haitian author in French." - Christiane Makward
"A novel of violent beauty." - Le Monde
"[Lahens] describes her country with a forceful beauty - the destruction that befell it, political opportunism, families torn apart, and the spellbinding words of Haitian farmers who solely rely on subterranean powers." - Donyapress
"One of the finest voices of Haitian contemporary literature." - L'Ob's
"Everything is there, the content, powerful, and the style, poetic." - Les Echos
"The novel's mythic atmosphere is enhanced by Lahens' meditations on personified nature, and Emily Gogolak's translation preserves a bare and moving voice throughout." - The Arkansas International
"Power and corruption are ever present, and their pressures-be they sexual or economic or both-are often impossible to reckon with or escape. Though what's most surprising is the sense that one has waded fully into the world these characters inhabit, a world so alive that I sometimes forgot I was reading a book at all. I'm reminded of first reading Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book that similarly transported me clean out of my self and into some other world beyond." - Christian Kiefer, The Paris Review"An invigorating and necessary investigation of tradition, politics, loss, and history." - Zeena Yasmine Fuleihan, Ploughshares
"on every reread of this multigenerational Haitian novel I find more complexity and beauty in its pages."- Cecilia Weddell, Associate Editor of Harvard Review Online
About the Author
Yanick Lahens was born in Port-au-Prince in 1953. After attending school and university in France, she returned to Haiti., where she taught literature at the university in Port-au-Prince and worked for the Ministry of Culture. Her first novel was published in 2000, and she won the prestigious Prix Femina for Moonbath in 2014. Emily Gogolak is a journalist focusing on migration, gender, and the US-Mexico border. A former editorial staffer at The New Yorker and a James Reston Reporting Fellow at the New York Times, she now lives in Texas. A graduate of Brown University in Comparative Literature, she is also a literary translator. Her translation of Moonbath won a 2015 French Voices Award.