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L'Enigme du retour, by Dany Laferrière. Montréal: Boréal; Paris: Grasset, 2009. ISBN 978-2-7646-0670-4. 289 pages; 301 pages. CND 24.95; EUR 18.00.
By now, anyone who has a passing interest has heard about the accolades Dany Laferrière's latest novel, L'Énigme du retour, has earned: winner of the French Prix Médicis 2009 and the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal 2009. A quick survey of the French press on both sides of the ocean would indicate that these two prestigious literary prizes are richly deserved. This novel, the twelfth in his "autobiographie américaine," is a hybrid of verse and prose, and travels from Montreal to New York, and from there to Port-au-Prince and Petit-Goâve. The catalyst for this voyage is the death of his exiled father. The novel poses two fundamental questions: Is it possible to go home again? Or, was it even possible to leave to begin with?
This book is both a distillation and an expansion of his previous eleven novels. He has written in verse in the past (Chronique de la dérive douce) and in haiku (parts of Éroshima), but he has never hybridized to this extent. This is also his most expansive novel in terms of setting. All of his previous novels had, for the most part, very focused settings (Montreal, New York, Petit-Goâve, Port-au-Prince), and his life in North America was dealt with separately from his life in Haiti. His travels, an eleven-novel journey from Haiti to Montreal and back to Haiti, are now brought together in a 300-page book.
The cast of characters is also expanded to include the boys and men of his family, people he had previously ignored. As he put in the dedication of Le goût des jeunes filles, "A tous ces hommes, à leur manière sincères, courageux et honnêtes, qui trouveront un jour, j'espère, leur chantre. Pardonnez-moi de le...