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This fresh, unsentimental look at what slaveowning does to (and for) one's interior life must be a first. And the writing - so prised and clean-limbed - is a marvel. (Toni Morrison )
Reminiscent of Doris Lessing's novel, THE GRASS IS SINGING...Martin's project was not to impose a contemporary sensibility on slavery, but to investigate what the daily fact of its brutality might do to one's interior life (GUARDIAN )
She creates a heroine as intriguing as she is repellent. And she forces the reader into the complicity and discomfort of a voyeur (NEW YORK TIMES )
The Los Angeles Times
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All in all, Property is a confusing novel. Set in the mid 1800s, Manon is a woman unhappily married to a adulterous slave owner who runs a sugar plantation. Dealing with debt and the imminent threat of a slave rebellion, the book is filled with tension both in the household and in the country as a whole. The main characters are all heavily flawed and mostly unlikeable, but you still find yourself interested in their fate.
At a little over 200 pages I found myself wondering how the story would be told in so few pages, and yet halfway through I was wondering how the story could continue. At points it felt dragged out, and at other times it felt like Valerie Martin had lost her way and was unsure where her story was going. But there were sparkling moments of poetic phrasing and the images of the house and the violence conjured up by her were beautifully clear. I would recommend this book as it is a quick read, but I would warn any potential reader that they may find it vague at points, and the ending extremely abrupt.
Manon Gaudet narrates. Her husband (who is never named but spoken of always as ‘my husband’ or ‘he’) is a racist brute with boorish manners who owns a money-eating sugar plantation and who is heavily in debt. His mismanagement of the estate, and the fact that he has fathered two children by her servant girl, Sarah, increases her misery and resentment in her marriage.
Meanwhile, slaves and servants are everywhere rising up in protest against their brutal white oppressors employing all manner of tactics including arson, desertion, fighting, savage attacks and burglary. Slowly but surely a resistance movement has been forming and this, coupled with a rapidly spreading cholera and yellow fever epidemic serves to create an atmosphere of fear, anger and extreme tension. After a lengthy chain of awful and terrifying events, Manon eventually achieves her independence, but at a great price.
This novel deals with 19th century notions of what constituted property: land, home, women, slaves, servants and children were all subject to the whims of men, unless by some miracle they gained their independence (although, even here they were at a disadvantage). Much of this is shocking to 21st century eyes, but we are left to reflect on just how dated this picture is – do we still harbour such attitudes? Martin does not need an explicit moral voice, the situation is plainly evil and we know what the truth of the matter is.
I am not entirely sure what my problem with this novel was. As noted earlier, none of the characters particularly engaged my sympathy. I felt guilty for not feeling sorry for Manon, but she was repugnant – kicking the ones below her in order, somehow, to relieve her own misery. The events within the narrative, moreover, are shocking, repellent, and upsetting, but I somehow failed to be moved by them as much as I felt I should be. Part of the problem was the prose. To begin with (about the first hundred pages), it flowed and was not difficult to read. Thereafter, there was some awkward phrasing and the odd superfluous sentence which somehow reduced my ‘enjoyment’ (if one can use such a word with respect to this sort of novel) of the book.
So, in conclusion, this book will make you feel uncomfortable, and it will challenge you. But not, perhaps, so effectively as other books which deal with racism and the misery of slavery (To Kill A Mockingbird, The Grass Is Singing, Uncle Tom’s Cabin etc). Nor is it written with quite the same lyricism as these novels, so some passages represent a struggle. However, I think that the struggle and the challenge are worth it, in the end.
The setting is America's deep south in the early nineteenth century and... Read more
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