Windward Heights

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AUG 2, 1999

A professor of French Caribbean literature at Columbia University and a prize-winning author whose novels (including I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and Segu) draw upon African and Caribbean history, Cond sets her latest offering--a complex reworking of Emily Bront 's Wuthering Heights--at the turn of the last century, a period of socialist organizing and social unrest in the Caribbean. The novel opens in Cuba, shortly after the death of the revolutionary Jos Mart . Razy , a young man who, as a foundling, was named for the razy , or heath, on which he was discovered in Guadeloupe, has decided to return there and exact revenge from Aymeric de Linsseuil, the rich Creole who married Razy 's beloved Catherine Gagneur, the daughter of the man who raised Razy . He achieves vengeance by marrying Aymeric's youngest sister, Irmine, but only after impregnating Catherine, who dies giving birth to their daughter, Cathy. Razy lives on, trying to learn the arts of Santeria so that he can resurrect Catherine, and becoming wealthy. He passes on his hatred of Aymeric to his first-born, the so-called Razy II. Cathy and Razy II meet and fall in love, but the scars left by one generation are borne by the next, and they cannot achieve happiness. Describing a social and political moment far more complex than Bront 's, Cond introduces a host of first-person narrations by servants, fishwives and hired hands, which are the most winning passages in the novel. Because Cond clearly knows how to weave a large and beautiful tapestry and has done so in earlier books, it's hard to say why she chose the corset of Bront 's novel. A much larger, more satisfying novel seems ready to break free from this one.