Shelf Unbound “Recommended Reading” selection
Literary Hub “New Books” selection
“‘The bliss and the brutality’ of a childhood in early-1960s Haiti are portrayed with dreamlike, then nightmarish, eloquence. . . . There’s a mythic feel to the larger context . . . which makes the precise detail of this depiction of a young boy’s privileged yet fragile life in a large upper-class family even more effective.” —New York Times Book Review
“An existential epic.” —Trinidad Express
“Masterful writing. . . . A timely tale displaying the establishment of autocracy as inexorable once the process has begun.” —PopMatters
“Intense. . . . A landscape of time and place, tightly focused, accurately and flawlessly depicted.” —Historical Novels Review
“Stylistically bold. . . . An investigation of the ways history does and doesn’t shape us.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Unsettling yet sensual, the evocative novel The Delicate Beast contemplates the personal and social aftereffects of history’s continued cycles of conflict.” —Foreword Reviews
“In a headlong flight from history’s black-winged angels, The Delicate Beast spirals across the globe and the twentieth century in densely sensual prose that merges the Caribbean surreal of Alejo Carpentier with the looping, philosophical conundrums of Javier Marías.” —Esther Allen, translator of Javier Marías’s Dark Back of Time and Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama
“From the novel’s lush opening, set in the ‘Tropical Republic,’ to countries and cities well beyond its frontiers, Celestin’s voice echoes not only in a world of pain and violence, but also in the beauty and miraculous weapon of literature.” —Maryse Condé, author of Waiting for the Waters to Rise and The Gospel According to the New World
“Brilliantly written, The Delicate Beast is a sweeping novel of a young man’s search for identity that follows him from a boyhood touched by the splendors and dangers of the ‘Tropical Republic’ into a new and startling international life. It is a powerful tale.” —Peter Constantine, author of The Purchased Bride
“A beautiful and devastating novel about a man born into horrifying political violence and condemned to experience the loss and sorrow he’s spent his whole life avoiding. The sometimes suggestive, sometimes shocking sense of boyhood Celestin creates here is reminiscent of two great classics, Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and Sebald’s Austerlitz.” —Alice Kaplan, author of The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach and Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris
“Henry James once said that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. The Delicate Beast is a fine example of history writ fierce and smart and large. This novel combines superb writing and psychological depth with grace and a knowing eye. Celestin’s protagonist struggles against the ‘determination of birth, blood, place, and time,’ until the ending suggests yet another possible beginning.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon
11/01/2024
DEBUT This first novel by Celestin, a Haiti-born scholar of French and comparative literature (emeritus, Univ. of Connecticut), follows an unnamed main character through his childhood, starting in the 1950s in a Caribbean nation referred to only as "the Tropical Republic." In intricate if sometimes florid prose, Celestin introduces a large cast of characters who live in the republic. His descriptions of the paradise are particularly lovely. The boy's life is full of privilege and he lacks for nothing, until a character called "the Mortician" (seemingly inspired by the Haitian dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier) ruins the Tropical Republic. As the Mortician disrupts the nation's status quo, the boy, his brother, and their parents flee to the United States to save themselves. In the States, the main character feels out of place and must discover who he is away from his homeland. The narrative style is difficult to follow at times, making it hard to sympathize with the characters or comprehend their motivations. The many characters known by titles instead of real names can also be confusing. VERDICT An optional purchase for libraries seeking literary historical fiction about political violence and the Caribbean diaspora.—Kristen Stewart
2024-11-23
A man reckons with 20th-century tragedies.
What does a life reveal when explored from different angles? This sprawling book begins in 1995 at an informal gathering of artists and academics in a Brooklyn brownstone. They’re discussing the ongoing civil war in Yugoslavia, and one of the attendees, a man from Sarajevo, says he’s going back next week. Robert Carpentier, another guest, asks why he’s returning to a place where people are being killed every day. The next step the novel takes is to jump back several decades and adopt a very different register. Here we meet a boy who’s studying for his First Communion—presumably the younger Carpentier, though the section that follows mostly avoids using names. He lives in the Tropical Republic, a country run by a politician known here as The Mortician. (Think Haiti under the rule of François Duvalier.) The political situation forces the boy’s parents to leave the country, with the rest of the family eventually following. Once they’re settled in New York City, the novel skips ahead to Carpentier in the 1970s, when he’s studying art history in Europe—mainly the paintings of Jean Siméon Chardin. After some time in Europe, he returns to the U.S., where he finds a job and embarks on a series of relationships before marrying. Civil war in the Balkans isn’t the only crisis referenced here; Carpentier and his wife also watch as friends die from AIDS. Eventually the novel returns to the Brooklyn apartment where it began, and we see how the Sarajevo man caused tensions in Carpentier’s marriage. It’s a stylistically bold look at one man weaving in and out of history, and the subtle effects on his psyche.
An investigation of the ways history does and doesn’t shape us.
