{"id":9774,"date":"2015-06-14T22:23:57","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T02:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=9774"},"modified":"2015-06-14T22:24:49","modified_gmt":"2015-06-15T02:24:49","slug":"the-martyred-crowd-cathedral-of-the-august-heat-a-novel-of-haiti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2015\/06\/the-martyred-crowd-cathedral-of-the-august-heat-a-novel-of-haiti.html","title":{"rendered":"The Martyred Crowd: “Cathedral of the August Heat, A Novel of Haiti”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

This<\/a> is a short, feverish, seamy, painful book from 1987 about a revolutionary upsurge among the poorest people in the Western Hemisphere. It\u2019s written by a dissident journalist exiled by the Duvaliers. It\u2019s Communist in rhetoric, and there are moments toward the end when the rhetoric and also the optimism<\/a> feel really flimsy. But most of the book is given over to tales of life at the bottom: sultry dreamscapes and violent nightmares, phantasmagoric beauty and brutal suffering, flame-of-the-forest flowers fluttering onto rivers that run with outlaw blood.<\/p>\n

I mentioned Jean Genet when I quoted this book<\/a> and I do think if you like him at all you should read this. There\u2019s a mermaid, and a prison laundress; a heroic tap-tap driver and a child weeping outside the gates of Heaven. There\u2019s a fairly hilarious failed birth-control campaign. Catholic imagery comes into the book mostly through the lens of Vodoun, although toward the end there\u2019s also a sharp nod to liberation theology.<\/p>\n

I read it in the Bridget Jones translation, and although I obviously can\u2019t compare it to the original, it seemed to flow really well and handled the transitions from more-traditional to more-folkloric or more-fevered narration well.
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