Product Description

Chamoiseau's grand and intriguing riff on the police procedural, "Solibro Magnificent" represents another masterpiece by the author of the award-winning "Texaco". It's carnival time at Fort-de-France, Martinique. Before an enraptured public, the great teller of tales, Solibro Magnificent, is felled, seemingly choked by his own words. Is it autostrangulation or murder? .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #164295 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-30
• Released on: 1999-03-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Amazon.com Review
When Patrick Chamoiseau, Martinican author of the brilliant, magical novel Texaco, turns his hand to writing a police procedural, you can be sure that the "usual suspects" won't be usual at all. In Solibo Magnificent the title character, a master storyteller, dies on the first page, having uttered the mysterious phrase patat'-si ("this potato"). Though it is evident to his Creole audience that Solibo's throat was "snickt by the Word," to the Fort-de-France police department it's a clear case of murder. Before you can say patat'-si, all the witnesses are in custody, where they are brutally mistreated in an attempt to wrest confessions from them.

The first thing any reader notices about a Chamoiseau novel is the language (beautifully translated from the French by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov), which tends to tumble in cataracts of vivid imagery, almost as if it were being spoken instead of written. And given that this novel is really about the slow death of an oral tradition at the hands of a culture of literacy, the hurly-burly style is singularly appropriate. Though Solibo Magnificent can certainly be enjoyed simply as a tragicomic tale of mysterious death and police bungling, readers with even a superficial knowledge of Martinique's history as a French colony (and now departement) will find plenty of philosophical gold in the deeper veins of meaning that lie beneath the surface of the novel. There is, for example, the conflict between the deeply rooted Creole culture--an orally transmitted tradition of stories, demons, magic, and community--and the imposed colonial system of logic, scientific proof, the written word, and French as the dominant language. In such a world, Solibo the storyteller cannot live, and Chamoiseau--himself a character in the novel--is fully aware of the irony of committing his tale to the page. As he says at the end of the novel,

"I understood that to write down the word was nothing but betrayal, you lost the intonations, the parody, the storyteller's gestures.... I decided to squeeze out a reduced, organized, written version, a kind of ersatz of what the Master had been that night: it was clear now that his words, his true words, all of his words, were lost for all of us--and forever."

Solibo's throat might be "snickt by the word," his "true words" lost forever, but fortunately Patrick Chamoiseau, the "word-scratcher," is still here to remind us of just how much we've lost.

From Publishers Weekly
When Solibo, one of Fort-de-France's last Creole-speaking storytellers, falls inexplicably dead during a Carnival performance, the ensuing circus-like investigation brilliantly conjures up Martinique history and Creole culture on a much smaller scale than Chamoiseau's acclaimed epic, Texaco. Led by the cerebral inspector Pilon and the hard-boiled sergeant Bouaffesse, the Francophone police are determined to crack the case, even if it means breaking a few heads along the way. Having rounded up the audience, including Chamoiseau the "word-scratcher" himself, the scrappy fruit-vendor Doudou-Menar, the pure-blooded African "Congo" and assorted, equally vivid characters, the police find their inquiry turning comic, violent, tragic and magical as they haplessly investigate how the vagabond shaman Solibo could have had his throat "snickt by the Word." Written four years before Texaco and published in France at the same time as Creole Folktales, Chamoiseau's bewitching tale has been ably translated by Rejouis and Vinokurov?as far as his poetic mix of Parnassian French and spoken Creole can be translated. At once funny and elegiac, this novel delivers Chamoiseau's return gift to his island's storytellers and confirms his place among them. (Mar.) FYI: Chamoiseau's Texaco, published here last year, won the 1992 Prix Goncourt.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Was the Creole storyteller Solibo Magnificent killed by his own words or was he murdered by one of his friends? So begins Chamoiseau's (Texaco, Random, 1997) novel about the spiritual and political power of language. While frightened witnesses recount their memories of Solibo and the night he died, the ruthless and often brutal police attempt to solve the case neatly and logically. Their investigation, however, quickly degenerates into more violence and death. Originally written in Creole and French, the novel's depiction of the misunderstanding, distrust, and hatred between the French-speaking officials and the Creole-speaking residents of Martinique's slums is unfortunately lost in the English translation, in spite of an adequate explanation in the afterword by translator Rejouis. The characters are hidden in a confusing story that comes to a dry and unsatisfying conclusion, leaving the reader still wondering who Solibo Magnificent was and why he died. Recommended for libraries with a strong interest in Caribbean literature.?Ellen Flexman, Indianapolis-Marion Cty. P.L.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

The death of oral tradition
What a great novel! Chamoiseau manages to create both a rich alleghory on the death of oral tradition, and a keystone cops-style farce. The style and language that Chamoiseau plays with here is a delight to read, and takes on an added weight considering the setting. It's reminiscent of Rushdie's mishmash of Indian and English to make a point in Midnight's Children. Kudos to the translator for not attempting to translate everything in the text. There are footnotes to a glossary, which at first seems daunting, but is very rewarding - I never thought footnotes could lead to so much laughter (I take that back, D.F. Wallace). Ultimately, this book is a love affair of language. Enjoy!

Chamoiseau deserves a wider audience!
Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnificent is a powerful novel, both hilarious and tragic at once. In Fort-de-France, Martinique, Solibo (a Creole nickname meaning somersault or pirouette) has dropped dead in front of some of his followers after uttering a non-sequitor, "That potato!" His band of listeners, believing this to be a part of Solibo's act, wait patiently for the great man to rouse himself. When he doesn't, the police are brought in, and they at once suspect the witnesses , which include the character of the author, of having murdered Solibo. What follows is part slapstick, part theater of the absurb, part philosophy, part tragedy, part magic, all poetry. Somehow Chamoiseaux manages to meld these elements into a coherent whole that makes this novel an extraordinary experience.

As other reviewers have noted, this story is not only about the death and murder investigation of a beloved storyteller, but about the death of the oral tradition in general. Chamoiseau leaves no doubt that he intends the reader to walk away with this notion. Written words are inadequate to describe the power of the spoken; one has only to read the reconstructed version of Solibo's last words at the end of the book to understand this. Despite the somewhat heavy-handed approach to his theme, Chamoiseau tells a riveting story with natural lyricism. (Kudos to the translators!)

This author deserves a much wider readership (or is it audience?)

For those who love language
An incredibly readable story of an endangered species: the oral tradition. That the telling of this small epic is done with adding both French and Creole phrases (translated in a glossary) is *essential* to understanding the people living in Fort-de-France. There are broad hints at Césaire's ideas of negritude and many of Fanon's racially-charged concepts from his "Black Skin, White Masks." Chamoiseau even puts himself in the tale as the character of the "word scratcher," someone who makes a pitiful attempt to put down in words what the oral tradition is all about.

This book is a true gem.