Pina - by Titaua Peu (Paperback)

About the Book

"Far from Tahiti's postcard-perfect beaches, Ma and Auguste and five of their nine children live a hand-to-mouth life in destitute, run-down Tenaho. Nine-year-old Pina, abused and neglected in equal measure, is the keeper of her family's secrets, though the weight of this knowledge soon proves to be a burden no child could ever bear. A victim of her father's alcoholic rages and the object of her mother's anger and indifference, Pina protects her younger sister, Mïora, as best she can, but a tragic accident upsets the precarious equilibrium of the family, setting them on a path to destruction. The fault lines of her family, descendants of M ga s'ohi warriors who once fended off European settlers, begin to shift and crack open, laying bare how the past shapes and haunts the present: her brother Pauro falls in love with a Frenchman, her sister Rosa sinks into sexual exploitation as a futile means of escape, her eldest brother August Junior's addictions and temper may lead him into ruin, and Hannah, the oldest daughter who had escaped to France, is beckoned back home, fearing the worst. the history of a family, an island, and a people, reaching back to a time before colonial rule and stretching into an imagined, hopeful future of independence and autonomy, offering the promise of redemption."--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2017 Eugène Dabit Prize
Winner of the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize

From award-winning Tahitian author Titaua Peu comes Pina, a devastating novel about a family torn apart by secrets and the legacy of colonialism, held together by nine-year-old Pina, a girl shouldering the immeasurable weight of her family's traumas.

Far from Tahiti's postcard-perfect beaches, Ma and Auguste and five of their nine children live a hand-to-mouth life in destitute, run-down Tenaho. Nine-year-old Pina, abused and neglected in equal measure, is the keeper of her family's secrets, though the weight of this knowledge soon proves to be a burden no child could ever bear.

A victim of her father's alcoholic rages and the object of her mother's anger and indifference, Pina protects her younger sister, Moïra, as best she can, but a tragic accident upsets the precarious equilibrium of the family, setting them on a path to destruction. The fault lines of her family, descendants of Mā'ohi warriors who once fended off European settlers, begin to shift and crack open, laying bare how the past shapes and haunts the present: her brother Pauro falls in love with a Frenchman, her sister Rosa sinks into sexual exploitation as a futile means of escape, her eldest brother August Junior's addictions and temper may lead him into ruin, and Hannah, the oldest daughter who had escaped to France, is beckoned back home, fearing the worst.

Elegantly translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Pina introduces a bold and profoundly humane anticolonial writer. It's a gut punch of a novel that traces the history of a family, an island, and a people, reaching back to a time before colonial rule and stretching into an imagined, hopeful future of independence and autonomy, offering the promise of redemption.

Review Quotes

Praise for Pina:

"Pina's Tahiti is not the paradise of brochures. It's a land still haunted by colonization and crippled by poverty and crime. But even as things bottom out, a groundswell of Tahitian self-awareness builds toward the 2016 referendum on independence from France. The question is: Can the country, and Pina, ever truly break free? Peu's 'rough-hewn, oral, humane prose' (in the words of the translator, Jeffrey Zuckerman) rings fiercely true."

-The New York Times

"This evocative and layered story is a treat."

-Publishers Weekly

"A scalding corrective to the romantic Western view of French Polynesia written with authority, urgency, and compassion"

-Kirkus Reviews

"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.'"

-Lily Meyer, NPR

"[T]he compilation of characters which Peu has imagined are vibrant and diverse. A postmodern and polyphonic take on the coming-of-age novel . . ."

-Kiran Bhat, Asymptote

"[A] dark family saga about the effects of colonialism on one family and the nation they live in."

-Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews

"[T]he worst horrors, award-winning author Peu exposes in her English debut, belong to colonialism .... 'Forging a voice in English that feels true to Titaua Peu's rough-hewn, oral, humane prose, ' writes translator Zuckerman, was certainly a multilayered accomplishment of careful understanding and empathic respect. Bearing witness seems a minimal obligation for global readers."

-Terry Hong, Booklist

"Peu's portrait of Polynesia demonstrates the corrosive trickle-down effects of colonialism from generation to generation. . . . The keen manner in which Peu braids the strands of colonization, alcoholism, and domestic violence is nothing short of amazing."

-Lanie Tankard, The Woven Tale Press

"Titaua Peu's Pina translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, out recently from Restless Books, is an extraordinary novel that brings to mind the fiction of Emile Zola, depicting dehumanization in a highly nuanced social setting, and with a lush naturalist eye. And although the book is written in French, it is infused at the same time with a syntax and vocabulary and style that derives from the Polynesian dialect spoken in Tahiti. And it will almost certainly be the first work of Tahitian literature you've ever read."

-Dan Simon, Publisher of Seven Stories Press

"There are novels which crack like gunshots. Those of Titaua Peu mark a revolution in the literature of the Pacific. With Pina, it is the other face of Tahiti that appears; that of a society ravaged by cultural uprooting, worn down by misery and colonialism."

-Mediapart

"Titaua Peu reappropriates words long monopolized by Europeans and returns them to their place in the "natural" part of Polynesian heritage."

-Christine Chemeau, Le Monde Diplomatique

"The novelist seizes the reader with her fiery prose, serving her whirlwind story about the crossing paths of many different characters."

-Télérama