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Maryse Conde. Crossing the Mangrove. Richard Philcox, tr. New York. Doubleday. 1995. ix + 210 pages. $10.95. ISBN 0-385-47633-7.
Malyse Conde, whose corpus of eight novels provides her readers with a series of nomadic protagonists (see WLT 67:4, pp. 694-768), is no stranger to errancy. Having left Guadeloupe as an adolescent, she lived in France, then Africa, and no divides her time between the United States and Guadeloupe. Probing the complexity of errancy and exile by depicting protagonists struggling to find their place in the world, she explores her own relationship to rootedness and rootlessness.
Francis Sancher, Conde's protagonist in Crossing the Mangrove, imbues this novel with his presence and his absence. A disappointed political revolutionary, he comes to a small Guadeloupean community as...