Mamzelle Dragonfly [Paperback]

Adelise's mother wants to save her daughter from the heavy labor in sugarcane fields that made her an old woman at forty, so she sends Adelise to live with her pretty Aunt Philomene in the city. The aunt's home turns out to be in a slum, a "great plain swarming with shacks all tumbled together in the most perfect disorder and crossed by a muddy path dotted with wallowing pigs." But Adelise learns how to survive. If she must sell her body to do so, her soul remains strictly her own.

"Mamzelle Dragonfly" serves up small slices of hardscrabble life with cool, casual precision. For its characters each day is merely another "day in the stream of time." Passions tend to be uncomplicated spasms of lust, wrath, sorrow, or fear, and hope is "the sterile male papaya's when it goes ahead and flowers." If the unfazed tone (in conjunction with the setting) recalls certain writings by Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat, this book is more disconcerting. Kincaid's novels are partly arguments about colonialism in which the political awareness of her narrators suggests that one can make historical sense, at least, of life's flux; and Danticat's taut narrative lines firmly contain what might fall into confusion. But in Confiant's novel, events seem to happen for no reason. The effect is a peculiar feeling of vulnerability - the reader, like the book's characters, lives in the present moment with little warning of what comes next. Narrative direction is implied only occasionally, as when Adelise recalls the beloved tree behind her rural home and notes with mild surprise that she's become a city girl.

Holding the book together, besides its focus on Adelise's life between childhood and the age of twenty-six, is the author's voice: a blend of matter-of-fact reportage, coarse vulgarity, and song. Confiant is a Martinique citizen who wrote his novel in his native Creole and translated it into French, then turned it over to translator Linda Coverdale (who produced the glorious English version of Sebastien Japrisot's "A Very Long Engagement"). In "Mamzelle Dragonfly," swift people "go birdspeed"; those who disappear fast "took scamper powder." One character is "thin as a string's shadow," and another is "tie-him-down nuts." A man slow-dancing at the nightclub is "hard-oning" his partner, who just might consider giving him "a tiny taste of her box lunch." Adelise falls in love at last and blissfully idles under "the terrific sunblast of noon."

The setting of Martinique provides connective tissue, too, with Carnival and other social customs, including finely calibrated racial distinctions or identities from black to mulatto, from griffe to capresse, from France-white to beke. And there's thematic glue in the ongoing wars between the sexes. A worthy matron shouts at masculine intruders, "'Leave the women to deal with this or I'll lop off your plums!'" Another suggests, "'Airmail them some caca.'" Philomene sounds about right when she tells Adelise that a fallen man might stay down, but "A woman who falls is a chestnut" and will sprout right up again.

"Mamzelle Dragonfly" flutters along, touching down in gritty neighborhoods then flying off again, making the life within it feel both fragile and tough, both heavy and light.