From Booklist
Savane Mulet is the nominal landscape of this stream-of-consciousness-influenced novel that inhabits a dreamscape more than any particular town on Guadeloupe in the West Indies, where the great 1928 cyclone traumatized Eliette, then eight. Now Hurricane Hugo, whose force and violence unlock repressed memories of grief and loss, bookends Eliette's life. In the interim, a Haitian woman prophesied a girl child for Eliette, but pregnancy never was part of her life, though she so yearned for a child that she broke with her first husband and married a 50-year-old docker who, sadly, proved "inoperative in action" and then died, leaving her doubly embittered, alone in her cabin. Then in Eliette's tropical world of superstition, passions, and forces of nature, energies interlock when the golden jewelry of a woman named Esabelle seemingly brings a heaviness into the air that cracks the sky and leads to murder. Pineau's liquid flow of images, chronological leaps, and varied points of view add up to a treasurable experience for those who stay with it. Whitney Scott
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Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Polish
Self Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances FROM THE PUBLISHER
Self-Same Songs constitutes a major contribution to the growing literary study of autobiography. Using a range of authors, including Homer, Edward Gibbon, Benjamin Franklin, Somerset Maugham, Franz Kafka, and Eugene Delacroix, Roger J. Porter offers a broad-based examination of the autobiography and the varied techniques used by its practitioners over time. In a style that is both graceful and erudite, Porter focuses on the diverse motivations and rhetorical functions that the act of self-writing serves for particular writers. He reflects on the texts not only as an exploration of self-identity but also as the writers' attempts to modify the life in the act of writing about it. Then, stepping out of his critical role, Porter ends each chapter with an autobiographical discussion of his professional and personal engagement with the autobiographer under discussion, creating an intriguing and absorbing literary autobiography within the critical text.
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