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Hadriana in All My Dreams

By René Depestre & Edwidge Danticat &
Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre & Edwidge Danticat &  digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

Legendary Haitian author Depestre combines magic, fantasy, eroticism, and delirious humor to explore universal questions of race and sexuality.

“One-of-a-kind . . . [A] ribald, free-wheeling magical-realist novel, first published in 1988 and newly, engagingly translated by Glover . . . An icon of Haitian literature serves up a hotblooded, rib-ticking, warmhearted mélange of ghost story, cultural inquiry, folk art, and véritable l’amour.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“An exceptional novel . . . Depestre’s masterpiece and one of the greatest examples of Haitian literature.” —New York Journal of Books

Hadriana in All My Dreams, winner of the prestigious Prix Renaudot, takes place primarily during Carnival in 1938 in the Haitian village of Jacmel. A beautiful young French woman, Hadriana, is about to marry a Haitian boy from a prominent family. But on the morning of the wedding, Hadriana drinks a mysterious potion and collapses at the altar. Transformed into a zombie, her wedding becomes her funeral. She is buried by the town, revived by an evil sorcerer, then disappears into popular legend.

Set against a backdrop of magic and eroticism, and recounted with delirious humor, the novel raises universal questions about race and sexuality. The reader comes away enchanted by the marvelous reality of Haiti’s Vodou culture and convinced of Depestre’s lusty claim that all beings—even the undead ones—have a right to happiness and true love.

31 Reviews

3.0
“Magical little book about death, zombies, voodoo, and sex in Jacmel, Haiti. A young French bride dies on her wedding day and carnival and other hyjinx ensues. Among its striking moments is its description of a white woman disembarking a boat with other Haitian migrants on a beach in Port Antonio, Jamaica. There’s no time like the present to dive into all that is beguiling about Haitian fiction and this newly translated story is a good place to start.”
“This book transports you to the Haitian village of Jacmel in the year 1938. Among the things that happen here, we have a sex crazed butterfly who goes around violating the villages women and girls. The main part of this story, however, revolves around Hadriana, who drinks a strange potion that causes her to drop dead on her wedding day, only to be revived as a zombie.”

About René Depestre

René Depestre, born in 1926, is one of the most important voices of Haitian literature. A peer of seminal figures like Aimé Césaire, Pablo Neruda, and André Breton, Depestre has engaged with the politics/aesthetics of negritude, social realism, and surrealism for more than half a century. Having lived through significant moments in Haitian and New World history—from the overthrow of Haitian dictator Élie Lescot in 1946, to the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956, to a struggle with Haiti’s François “Papa Doc” Duvalier in 1957, to a collaboration with Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara and a fraught relationship with Fidel Castro in the 1960s and ’70s—Depestre is uniquely positioned to reflect on the extent to which the Americas and Europe are implicated in Haiti’s past and present. He is the author of Hadriana in All My Dreams.

Edwidge Danticat

EDWIDGE DANTICAT was born in Haiti and moved to the United States when she was twelve. She is the editor of Haiti Noir, Haiti Noir 2: The Classics, and the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory (an Oprah’s Book Club selection), Krik? Krak! (a National Book Award finalist), The Farming of Bones (an American Book Award winner), and the novel-in-stories The Dew Breaker. She has also written several young adult novels, children's picture books, and a travel narrative, After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel. Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2007 winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is a 2009 recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant. Watch Out for Falling Iguanas is her latest children's picture book.

Kaiama L. Glover

Kaiama L. Glover is an associate professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, coeditor of Yale French Studies' Revisiting Marie Vieux-Chauvet: Paradoxes of Postcolonial Feminine (issue no. 128), and translator of René Depestre's Hadriana in All My Dreams, Frenkétienne's Ready to Burst, and Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Dance on the Volcano. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation.

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