Crossing the Mangrove

By Maryse Conde

In this beautifully crafted, Rashomon-like novel, Maryse Conde has written a gripping story imbued with all the nuances and traditions of Caribbean culture. Francis Sancher--a handsome outsider, loved by some and reviled by others--is found dead, face down in the mud on a path outside Riviere au Sel, a small village in Guadeloupe.  None of the villagers are particularly surprised, since Sancher, a secretive and melancholy man, had often predicted an unnatural death for himself.  As the villagers come to pay their respects they each--either in a speech to the mourners, or in an internal monologue--reveal another piece of the mystery behind Sancher's life and death.  

Like pieces of an elaborate puzzle, their memories interlock to create a rich and intriguing portrait of a man and a community. In the lush and vivid prose for which she has become famous, Conde has constructed a Guadeloupean wake for Francis Sancher.  Retaining the full color and vibrance of Conde's homeland, Crossing the Mangrove pays homage to Guadeloupe in both subject and structure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9780307787705

Maryse Conde

Maryse Condé (b. February 11, 1934) is a French novelist, critic, and playwright from Guadeloupe. Condé is best known for her novel Ségou (1984–85). She has won various awards, such as the Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme (1986), Prix de l’Académie française (1988), Prix Carbet de la Carraibe (1997) and the New Academy Prize in Literature (2018) for her works.

Reviews for Crossing the Mangrove

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Traversée de la mangrove borrows the classic literary conceit of the "mysterious stranger": an outsider arrives in a small, closed community and inadvertently releases all the tensions that have been smouldering in the place. In this case, it's a village called Rivière au Sel, hidden in dense forests on the slopes of Guadeloupe's volcano, La Grande Soufrière, and the story opens with the unexplained death of Francis Sancher, who had come to live in the village a few years earlier, no-one being quite sure where from. During an overnight wake, a succession of local people reflect on Sancher and the way he has affected their lives, and in the process tell us a great deal about how life in the village works, and how it is affected by class, gender and ethnicity.Of course, Condé doesn't leave this literary convention in its standard form: she makes it clear that we are in the 1980s, and the village, remote as it is, does not exist in isolation. Everyone there has connections to the outside that define their lives in some way. They have come from somewhere else, they have been away to work or study and returned, they have close family in metropolitan France or abroad, they do business with the outside world, they have brought in a partner from elsewhere, etc. There is no such thing as an isolated village, and possibly there never was.The portraits of the villagers don't in the end tell us a great deal about Sancher: we get a lot of snippets about him, but they don't add up to a simple closed narrative about him. It is the villagers themselves who turn out to be at the centre, and Condé has a lot of fun telling us about them in a whole series of different styles, sometimes funny, sometimes very moving, but always packed with fascinating detail. Towards the end, we get a chapter about the local intellectual, a young man (inevitably!) called Lucien, in which Condé neatly demolishes most of our preconceptions about "the Caribbean novel" and manages to poke fun at quite a few well-known figures, including herself.

[cameling_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Do we really know who our neighbors are, who our friends are, what thoughts they keep to themselves, not to be shared with even their own family members? Francis Sancher is found dead in the mud along the path to Riviere au Sel, but the story isn't about how he died or even if someone had killed him. His wake, attended by everyone in the village, both those who detested the man and the few who liked him, is the event during which each person is lost in his or her own thoughts, analyzing the decisions they made, significant events in their lives and how they met Francis. Through the internal monologues, we're given a glimpse into the nature of Francis, a man who was complex, verbose, and yet secretive. In each of the internal monologues, there is a thread of sadness, some thicker than others, telling of dreams that have been set aside, hope that has been lost, children who are unloved and passions left unanswered. All the personal stories are beautifully nuanced. They highlight the caste system that existed in Guadaloupe based on the color of one's skin and provide a richly detailed cultural journey into this part of the world.

[agriffina · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a story told with simple language, unrestrained emotion and a complex narrative structure, all based around the mutual cruelty and interdependence in a small island community. The mystery in the story and the metaphor of the tangled mangrove swamp work in thematic ways that reach far beyond the particulars of the book.