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Guadeloupe Maryse Condé. Histoire de la femme cannibale. Paris. Mercure de France. 2003. 317 pages. euro18. ISBN 2-7152-2326-9
MARYSE CONDÉ'S Histoire de la femme cannibale, the recent novel by the author of Ségou (1984; see WLT 59:2, p. 309), Desirada (1997; see WLT 72:2, p. 437), and La Belle Créole (2001), is mostly set in postapartheid South Africa. Bearing some resemblance to the author, the main character, Rosélie Thibaudin, a much-traveled, middle-aged black female artist from Guadeloupe, seems to embody the possibilities and contradictions of multiculturalism. Her twenty-year relationship with a white British man (Stephen, a literature professor) brutally ends when he is assassinated late at night in a Cape Town...