"With expressive description and languid cadence, Dawes deftly constructs a background that serves as an amorphous setting for the complicated experience of a grieving son . . . With subtle yet lyrical description of internal struggles set against a foreign background, Bivouac serves as a deceptively symbolic read about the bleak and mirthless aspects of life and, subsequently, death."
"A deftly crafted and absolutely riveting read.
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"Better than ever, a dreamlike work about the island in the 1980s."
"With . . . dreamlike sequences, this is best suited for readers who enjoy character studies as well as lovers of Jamaican fiction."
"Bivouac speaks in tongues so that the reader hears both the market and the courtroom, the orchestra of ancestral voices and the tone of individual conscience. Kwame Dawes's novel laughs and mourns, claps hands for the inventive communal spirit, and wrings those same hands as a result of political malfeasance. I was thrilled to see the writer channel his father's prose and summon pre-independence Jamaica. As readers we should celebrate Bivouac because of its celebration of Jamaica and, by extension, the Caribbean. The novel is replete with generational continuity and loyalty, from father to son, mother to child, the dead and the writer charged with the task of being custodian of their spirits."
—Fred D'Aguiar, author of Feeding the Ghosts
"Kwame Dawes brings the beauty and subtle rhythms of his poetic voice to this moving, dreamlike novel where the past intercedes on the present. A deep pleasure to read and savor."
—Bernardine Evaristo, author of Mr. Loverman
"Dawes's novel is a poetic patchwork of waiting, of sliding into the past, casting into the future, but mostly of slow, sensorial limbo in the present...Dawes exercises significant stylistic restraint...so that his flourishes appear like musical interludes, culminating in a final explosion of style and imagination that overwhelms the initial questions the story raises."
—Maple Tree Literary Supplement
"Bivouac is Kwame Dawes's dark novel about death, politics, family, and sex in a Jamaica that has a 'scarcely understood sense of temporariness and dislocation,' with dialogue that puts you right onto the streets of Kingston."
—New West Indian Guide
2019-02-04
An examination of grief and politics in a deftly written novel set in 1980s Jamaica.
Periodically throughout this slim novel, George Ferron Morgan recalls with jaded wit the indignities of being a ghost editorial writer at a second-rate newspaper, working with hacks. The political climate which once leaned left has taken a hard right, instilling a general complacency among the politically disengaged and fueling George's paranoia as he wonders what punishment will be meted out for his earlier well-known radical activism. Overshadowing his cynicism is his undignified and suspicious death. As if that weren't enough, his son, Ferron, tortured by grief, annoyance, or his chronic dyspepsia—it's hard to tell which—is given the task of transporting his father's body home in the back seat of his Volvo. George's voice, in sections called "Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan," appears between the Ferron-driven chapters in which Ferron, his family, and his father's friends mourn George and debate the circumstances of his death. The book gets bogged down with Ferron's dalliances with a trio of women inexplicably willing to put up with his sudden disappearances, dishonesty, and guilt. While the backdrop of Jamaica's political climate is presumably meant to lend breadth, it is uncomfortably compact, making the novel read like an overlong short story or an underdeveloped historical novel. What rescues the book is Dawes' poetic ear, as when George recalls his days at Jamaica College with sensory acuity: "I remember...the sense of cold water, which was partly smell and partly touch…the smell of games: linseed oil on cricket bats and the chalky smell of composition balls and then later the smell of leather balls." A bold surprise occurs late in the book as it switches from prose to a near play-script format, when Ferron returns to an old family home, imagining an encounter with his old man as he sinks into the full spectrum of grief and contemplates ancestral lives passed.
If Dawes had followed the conventions of the historical novel, it might have made his book more accessible, but it should be read if only to savor the author's astonishing prose.
Beresford Bennett’s narration of this dramatic story set in Jamaica during the 1980s moves at a steady pace. The protagonist, Ferron, is dealing with the death of his father. The rhythm of Bennett’s tone and pace changes when he portrays Ferron and speaks in a Jamaican dialect. His solemn yet energetic intonation reflects the political upheaval on this small island. When he is portraying the story’s female characters, his voice has a higher pitch. From time to time, one hears a tone of urgency in his voice—as if there is a need to uncover a mystery. And, indeed, there is: Ferron is trying to find out the truth about how his father died. T.E.C. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
