Tropic of Violence
A Novel
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- $8.500
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- $8.500
Descripción editorial
A potent novel about lost youth and migration by the author of The Last Brother and Waiting for Tomorrow
Marie, a nurse in Mayotte, a far-flung, tropical department of France in the Indian Ocean, adopts a baby abandoned at birth by his mother, a refugee from Comoros. She names him Moïse and raises him as her own—and she avoids his increasing questions about his origins as he grows up. When Marie suddenly dies, thirteen-year-old Moïse is left completely alone, plunged into uncertainty and turmoil. In a state of panic, he runs away from home, and sets himself on a collision course with the gangs of Gaza, the largest and most infamous slum on the island.
Nathacha Appanah has deftly assembled a small chorus of voices who narrate the heartbreak, violence, and injustice of life in Mayotte. To Marie’s and Moïse’s perspectives she adds those of Bruce, a terrifying gang leader; Olivier, a police officer fighting a losing battle; and Stéphane, the naïve aid worker whose efforts to help Moïse only make him more vulnerable.
Tropic of Violence shines a powerful light on the particular deprivation and isolation in this forgotten and neglected part of France. At the same time, it is a moving portrayal of the desperation and inequality that are driving refugee crises across the world, and of the innocent children whose lives are being torn apart in their wake. This is a remarkable, unsettling new novel from one of the most exciting voices in world literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Orphaned gang members and desperate refugees live on a machete's edge in Appanah's blistering depiction (after Waiting for Tomorrow) of postcolonial chaos in Mayotte, an island in the Mozambique channel. A carousel of first-person narrators recount the abrupt life story of M ise, abandoned as a baby and taken in by Marie, a white nurse in Mayotte. After Marie dies, the teenage M ise's simmering identity crisis leads him into the island's unforgiving slum, a "violent no-man's land" called Gaza. There, the book-loving M ise, who names his dog after the author Henri Bosco, falls sway to gang leader Bruce, whose child soldiers run Gaza's economy by drug dealing, burglary, and political graft. Marked as a middle-class interloper, M ise is ripe for Bruce's exploitation. The calamitous chain of events that follows is narrated from beyond the grave by players who are helpless to change it and can only affirm its inevitability. "This country turns us all into beings who do wrong," Marie says in her ghostly narration. A journalist and native Mauritian, Appanah has a knack for reportorial detail that crystallizes the characters' commentary. Seen from above, present-day Mayotte is adrift in its own history, neglected by France, its parent state; at ground level it's bloodstained and redolent with "sour urine on street corners, ancient shit in the gutters, chicken being grilled on top of oil drums, eau de cologne and spices outside the houses, the sour sweat of men and women and musty reek of laundry." Appanah skillfully lets these perspectives merge in the short, brutal lives of her characters. This heralds Appanah as an essential cosmopolitan voice.
