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I Am Alive

Name: I Am Alive
Brand: UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS
SKU: 9780813948324
Price: 193.0 AUD
Availability: InStock

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESSISBN: 9780813948324

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$193.00

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By Kettly Mars, Translated by Nathan H. Dize
Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS
Release Date: December 29, 2022
Format: HARDBACK
Pages: 150

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I Am Alive (Je suis vivant) is celebrated Haitian author Kettly Mars's latest novel, telling the story of a bourgeois Caribbean family as it wrestles with issues of mental illness, unconventional sexuality, and the difficulty of returning home and rediscovery following the devastating 2010 earthquake. Mars, herself a survivor of the disaster, has crafted a complex, at times disorienting, but ultimately enthralling and powerfully evocative work of literature that adds to her reputation as one of the leading voices of the francophone world. When the mental health facility where he has been living for decades is severely damaged, Alexandre Bernier must return home to Fleur-de-Chene. His sister Marylene has also come home, leaving behind a flourishing career as a painter in Brussels, and begins to explore her sexuality with her artist's model Norah, who poses for her in secret. These homecomings are both a lift and a burden to the family matriarch, Eliane, a steadfast and resourceful widow. Over the course of the novel, past and present blend together as each character has an opportunity to narrate the story from their own perspective. In the end, it is the resilience of the Haitian people that allows them to navigate the seismic shifts in their family and in the land.

Kettly Mars is an award-winning writer and poet from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and the author of Savage Seasons. Nathan H. Dize is Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Oberlin College.

Dize's translation helps recreate a transnational space of kinship and solidarity for the Haitian community through careful attention to the innermost recesses of Mars's original text.-- "Reading in Translation" Returning to the post-quake timeline used in Aux frontieres de la soif (2013), Mars creates another narrative decidedly linked to the 2010 Haitian earthquake... Her choice to describe the edges of the tragedy rather than crafting a novel based solely on the horrific physical event is deceptively powerful. By targeting fringe circumstances such as sibling rivalry and family hierarchy, Mars ensures that the reader is pulled into a personalized version of the earthquake perhaps on an even more impactful, relatable level... The labyrinthian narrative structure chosen by Mars develops in such a way as to mirror the dizzying aftereffects of the quake, one from which its characters and the reader cannot escape. -- "French Review" The book's premise speaks to the current context of Haiti's fissured political foundation; the breakdown of the social fabric. The specter of cholera is a contemporary consequence of failed international intervention, which we see resurging right now. --Myriam J.A. Chancy, Scripps College

I Am Alive

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