From Publishers Weekly
Novelist Chamoiseau's second memoir (after School Days) evokes his early childhood, beginning with the rainy night his mother (whom he refers to as the Prime Confidante) walked to the midwife's house to give birth to him, an incident he claims is responsible for his "melancholic weakness for rainy weather." The book is divided into two sections, "Feeling" and "Leaving," both prompted by the author's meditations on his life in Fort-de-France, Martinique. Chamoiseau leads the reader into "the bewitching period" of his childhood, describing it with the doting subjectivity of an older, more mature relative who refers to the child he was as "the little boy." This boy, who was fascinated with torturing insects and rats, found more creative ways to spend his time after a "city storyteller" exposed him to "the astonishing richness of Creole orality," a quality that now animates Chamoiseau's prose in this volume and in such novels as Texaco. Chamoiseau calls the apartment house in which he grew up "old as eternity." It was the center of a world in which "the mamas" washed their clothing in water drawn from a communal fountain and spirits summoned by "people-with-powers" could cause human sickness and otherwise wreak havoc. It was a world of poverty, but his boy's imagination could transform squalor into beauty and meaning. Chamoiseau admits he "sacrifices everything to the music of the phrase," so readers might do well to approach this book as if it were as much fable as memoir. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
paper 0-8032-6382-1 A prequel to Chamoiseaus School Days (1997), this slim, sometimes rambling, sometimes stirringly poignant account covers the novelists (Texaco, 1997, etc.) early childhood between first cognition and education. Writing about himself in the third person as ``the boy,'' Chamoiseau savors the smallest recollected details of Martiniques rich Creole culture. From the limber patois and its incantatory intonations to irrefrangible smells and savory tastes, the island holds a spell over him that is more about the man than the boy. Yet Chamoiseau is too clear-eyed to revel in childhoods lost sensual word. The man knows it is inextricably limned in by amorality, heedless cruelty, and intimations of mortality. There is the annual family pig, much beloved, carefully fed, honored with a name, and which still makes its way to the Christmas table. There is the constant struggle of his mother, Ma Ninotte, to stay out of debt. And when shes deeply in debt to a particular merchant, it is the boy who is sent in her stead to do the shopping. There is the boys holy war, fed by rocks and matches, against insects and rats, which ends when he realizes he cannot kill an aging rat, which he calls the Old Man: ``They [the rats] transformed the little boys nature. Beneath the killer lay the makings of someone who is incapable of doing the slightest harm to the most despicable of the green flies.'' This account does suffer from the problem inherent in most recollections of earliest childhood: once youre past the luxurious tapestry of details and burgeoning awareness, there isnt much else beyond disparate anecdotes. It can and does get boring fast. Chamoiseaus style is an unusual and effective blend of high and low French and Creole, but despite translator Volks best efforts, it doesnt quite come across in English, seeming more precious and affected than original. This autobiographical fragment may not dim Chamoiseaus growing reputation but it wont illuminate it either. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Using the playful, orally inspired, and partially invented language for which he is renowned, Patrick Chamoiseau recalls the brilliant, magical universe of his early childhood in Martinique. At the center of this universe is his extraordinarily vigorous mother and her creative, pragmatic ways of coping with poverty and five children. As Chamoiseau presents these first impressions of an exceptional child growing up in a rich Creole culture, he also reflects in oblique but incisive ways on colonialism. He probes the boundary between reality and imagination, between the child's awakening understanding and the adult's memory of those earlier days.

SYNOPSIS

Memoir of Patrick Chamoiseau￯﾿ﾽs early years, before the time recounted in School Days - - the first impressions of an exceptional child growing up in a rich Creole culture.

FROM THE CRITICS

Anderson Tepper

"Memory, let's make a pact long enough for a sketch." Patrick Chamoiseau, the acclaimed Martinican author of Texaco and Solibo Magnificent, offers this invocation at the outset of his latest memoir, which covers the years just prior to School Days, his earlier reminiscence. Neither his memory nor his imagination disappoints him as they lead him back through the colorful streets and markets, the blinding heat and the pouring rain of a long-vanished Fort-de-France. "Memory, are you taking off?" he asks later, in a light-infused riff that echoes the Vladimir Nabokov of Speak, Memory.

And memory does take off in this buoyant, mischievous portrait of the novelist as a little boy, in the years when his life revolved around the daily rhythms of his four siblings and his epic mother, Ma Ninotte, whom he calls "the Prime Confidante." From his perch at the window of their "noble" and "dusty" house ("situated in the midst of the city, it filtered the city"), the young Chamoiseau absorbs the sights and sounds, the wretchedness and wonder, of a modernizing Fort-de-France "that was beginning to cement its eyes shut." From the Syrian shopkeepers to the bewitching storytellers steeped in an oral tradition, Chamoiseau catalogs the myriad impressions of Caribbean life and celebrates the rich conglomeration of influences that made up the Creole culture of his island world.

"Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles," the writer and his colleagues Jean Bernabe and Raphael Confiant declared emphatically in "L'Eloge de la Creolite," their literary manifesto of 1989. Now, looking back, Chamoiseau introduces us to the people behind that idea -- the country-bred figure of his neighbor Jean-Yvette, for example, whose spellbinding nighttime stories "came to us from Caribbean memories, from the swarming of Africa, from the diversities of Europe, from the festering of India, from the quakes of Asia, from the vast touch of the peoples in the prisms of the open islands, the very sites of Creolity." Boldly and happily, Chamoiseau's Creole synthesis dances atop the ruins of both the French colonial past and the shopworn, confining negritude -- the race-centered aesthetic of many French-speaking black intellectuals -- propounded by Martinique's poet-president, Aime Cesaire.

Childhood is a beautifully etched memoir, as engaging and inventive as the shape-shifting Creole language ("a universe of canny resistance, of salvational cruelty, rich with several genies"). And while Chamoiseau is certainly enjoying his ascension in the realms of Francophone literature (Texaco won the 1992 Prix Goncourt in France), he continues to fashion himself, with a knowing wink, as more "Word Scratcher" than accomplished author. Yet there is certainly the touch of a Caribbean Rabelais in his riotous voice. With such champions as John Updike and Milan Kundera trumpeting his significance, it looks like he has just begun to stir things up on a grand scale. Chamoiseau, one might ask: Are you taking off yet? -- Salon

New York Times Book Review

A bewitching writer...Chamoiseau's particular gift is to be both buoyant in spirit and trenchant in observation.

NY Times Book Review

A bewitching writer...Chamoiseau's particular gift is to be both buoyant in spirit and trenchant in observation.

Patrick Farrell - New York Times Book Review

...[A] slight, intimate narrative that keeps hinting it may become something bigger....Chamoiseau offers pungent tastes of Creole medicine and magic, the tantalizing accents and scents of a past just out of reach.

Publishers Weekly