Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy by Marie Vieux-Chauvet Permanent Exile A review by Madison Smartt Bell For the last thirty years of the twentieth century, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Amour, colere et folie was legendary for being lost. Published in France by Gallimard in 1968, this triptych of thematically linked novellas soon caused alarming ripples in the author's native Haiti, where the Vieux-Chauvet family had already lost three of its members to the regime of state terror erected by Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, beginning in 1957. Warned that the book would almost certainly provoke serious reprisals, Vieux-Chauvet persuaded Gallimard to withdraw it, while she went into permanent exile in New York City, where she died in 1973 at 57. Her husband, Pierre Chauvet, made an emergency trip to Haiti, where he purchased as many copies of the book already in circulation there as he could recover -- in order to destroy them. Remnants of the Gallimard edition were discreetly sold by Vieux-Chauvet's children, in very few venues, until the stock was exhausted in 2000, and a pirated edition made a... Read the entire review More reviews from The Nation

Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gerard Prunier

Amerika -- The Missing Person: A New Translation, Based on the Restored Text by Franz Kafka

The Armies by Evelio Rosero

The Ax by Donald E. Westlake

Bonsai (08 Edition) by Alejandro Zambra

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley

Buying Into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World (Pitt Comp Literacy Culture) by Catherine Prendergast

Che's Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image (Vintage Originals) by Michael Casey

The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up by Yiwu Liao

C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems (09 Edition) by C. P. Cavafy

Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil by Peter Maass

Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America by Anne-Marie Cusac

Dancing to the Precipice: The Life of Lucie de La Tour Du Pin, Eyewitness to an Era by Caroline Moorehead

Death in Spring by Merce Rodoreda

The Dickson Baseball Dictionary by Paul Dickson

Don't Cry: Stories by Mary Gaitskill

The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov by Jack Tworkov

The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by Mary Beard

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life by Gerald Martin

George, Being George: George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals by Nelson W. Aldrich

The Good Soldiers by David Finkel

Hard Rain Falling (New York Review Books Classics) by Don Carpenter

How Fiction Works by James Wood

Isaac's Torah: Concerning the Life of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld Through Two World Wars, Three Concentration Camps and Five Motherlands by Angel Wagenstein

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy by Marie Vieux-Chauvet

Memories of the Future (New York Review Books Classics) by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: an Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (08 Edition) by Alison Light

News from the Empire by Fernando Del Paso

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

Only Love Can Break Your Heart by David Samuels

An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides by Anne Carson

Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang by John Ayto

Passionate Uprisings : Iran's Sexual Revolution (08 Edition) by Pardis Mahdavi

Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America by William Graebner

The Poetry of Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke and Edward Snow

The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills by C. Wright Mills

The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin

Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century by Tony Judt

Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 by Matthew J. Smith

The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business by Nelson Lichtenstein

The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 by Paul Krugman

Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto

The Road to Democracy in Iran (Boston Review Books) by Akbar Ganji

Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer by Wendell E. Pritchett

Selected Poems by Wallace Stevens

Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen

The She-Devil in the Mirror by Horacio Castellanos Moya

The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe

Sophocles' Ajax by John Tipton

Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate

Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North by Thomas Sugrue

Terror and Joy: The Films of Dusan Makavejev by Lorraine Mortimer

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin D. G. Kelley

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

War Is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War by James Neugass and Peter N. Carroll and Peter Glazer

White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Brenda Wineapple

Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser

The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation by Fanny Howe

Yalo (Rainmaker Translations) by Elias Khoury

Try 4 issues of The Nation, FREE! Where literature and the arts have made a difference since 1865. Join readers who demand more of writers than bestsellers...more of artists than "product"...and insist that political leaders serve the common good. If you like what you see, including access to every weekly article and review back to 1865, you can get 16 more issues (20 weeks in all) for just $9.97. Click here for details.

• back to top

Follow us on...