Texaco - (Vintage International) by Patrick Chamoiseau (Paperback)

About the Book

Winner of France's Prix Goncourt, this funny, passionate, and in exhaustively inventive novel is nothing less than a mythic history of the author's native Martinique and its Creole language and culture. "(Chamoiseau's) prose (is) Rabelaisian: erudite, vulgar, stupendously energetic . . . driven by an African beat".--"The New York Times Book Review".

Book Synopsis

"Chamoiseau is a writer who has the sophistication of the modern novelist, and it is from that position (as an heir of Joyce and Kafka) that he holds out his hand to the oral prehistory of literature."
--Milan Kundera

Of black Martinican provenance, Patrick Chamoiseau gives us Texaco (winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize), an international literary achievement, tracing one hundred and fifty years of post-slavery Caribbean history: a novel that is as much about self-affirmation engendered by memory as it is about a quest for the adequacy of its own form.

In a narrative composed of short sequences, each recounting episodes or developments of moment, and interspersed with extracts from fictive notebooks and from statements by an urban planner, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the saucy, aging daughter of a slave affranchised by his master, tells the story of the tormented foundation of her people's identity. The shantytown established by Marie-Sophie is menaced from without by hostile landowners and from within by the volatility of its own provisional state. Hers is a brilliant polyphonic rendering of individual stories informed by rhythmic orality and subversive humor that shape a collective experience.

A joyous affirmation of literature that brings to mind Boccaccio, La Fontaine, Lewis Carroll, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Joyce, Texaco is a work of rare power and ambition, a masterpiece.

From the Back Cover

Patrick Chamoiseau produces a mythic history of the Creole nation that arose from the forced marriage of French and African peoples in his native Martinique. The chief spokeswoman for that nation is the indomitable and profanely wise Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the founder of Texaco, a teeming shantytown poised on the edge of a city that constantly threatens to engulf it. Now Marie-Sophie is Texaco's protectress as well. For only she can dissuade an urban planner from ordering her anarchic quarter razed to the ground. Like Scheherazade before her, she relies on stories - stories of slaves and sorcerers, thugs and courtesans, uprisings and eruptions.

About the Author

Patrick Chamoiseau lives on Martinique. His other books include Chronique des sept misères and Solibo Magnifique. Texaco has been translated into fourteen languages.