Dany LaFerrière

A Drifting Year finds Haitian expatriate Laferrière plagued by his recollections. In this short novel written in stanzas, the young exile arrives in the unfamiliar city of Montreal. Here, he quickly discovers all the things endemic to the Canadian immigrant experience; racism, poverty, and disorientation plague the budding writer. Here is an author at his best when fiction and memoir exploit each other. The dreamscape at the end of the longer novel easily eclipses the cold streets of Montreal and the stinking slums of Port-au-Prince. If A Drifting Year is exploratory surgery, Dead Men is life-saving trauma. Despite all advances in medicine, time will not be cheated. Only writers like Laferrière can hope to make the living walk the earth forever. -Excerpt from Hal Niedzvieck's review in Quill and Quire, November 1997

A Drifting Year

At the age of twenty-three, the narrator hurriedly packed his bags and left behind the stifling heat of Port-au-Prince for the unending winter of Montreal. It was 1976, and Baby Doc Duvalier's regime had just killed a journalist colleague. But thirty-three years later, after his father's death, he decides to return him to Baradères, the village where he was born. How does one return from exile? In Dany's case, he grounds himself in a hotel room in Port-au-Prince, afraid to see the city he has dreamed of in Montreal. Every time he ventures out of this safety zone, the past and present collide in dizzying ways - the rhythm of the language, the faces of the people, the dust on the roads. How is it that we are undeniably born of a particular place? Why are we always our father's son? The Return captures the tension between being from a place but not of it and the subtle ways in which the sights and sounds of memory can seduce. This is at once a novel that is new and original, that melds haiku and narration. A serious book, yet poetic, oneiric, realist. It is the novel of a great writer.

The Return

Brilliant and tense, Dany Laferrière's first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, is as fresh and relevant today as when it was first published in Canada in 1985. With ribald humor and a working-class intellectualism on par with Charles Bukowski's or Henry Miller's, Laferrière's narrator wanders the streets and slums of Montreal, has sex with white women, and writes a book to save his life. With this novel, Laferrière began a series of internationally acclaimed social and political novels about the love of the world, and the world of sex, including Heading South and I Am a Japanese Writer. It launched Laferrière as one of the literary world's finest provocateurs and continues to draw strong comparisons to the writings of James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac. The book was made into a feature film and translated into several languages — this is the first U.S. edition.

How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired

On the sun-drenched island of Haiti in the 1970s, under the shadow of “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s notorious regime, locals eke out an existence as servants, bartenders and panderers to the white elite. Fanfan, Charlie, and Legba, aware of the draw of their adolescent, black bodies, seduce rich, middle-aged white tourists looking for respite from their colourless jobs and marriages. These “relationships” mirror the power struggle inherent in all transactions in Port-au-Prince’s seedy back streets. Heading South takes us into the world of artists, rappers, Voodoo priests, hotel owners, uptight Parisian journalists and partner-swapping Haitian lovers, all desperately trying to balance happiness with survival. Made into an award-winning film starring Charlotte Rampling, this provocative novel, translated for the first time into English, explores the lines between sexual liberation and exploitation, artistic freedom and appropriation, independence and colonialism.

Dany LaFerrière

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