Lire jusqu'à la nausée, comme certains passages de Dostoïevski, où le malaise des personnages nous contamine, nous envahit en nous laissant impuissants, incapables de faire changer le cours des choses, inéluctable... ( )

This was a hard book for me to keep reading; I put it down for long stretches several times, and had to make myself read it. It's a stream-of-consciousness narrative in two parts: one from the perspective of Rosie Carpe, a young French single mother the other from Lagrand, a Guadaloupe resident who finds himself compelled to help Rosie when she lands on the island in search of her brother Lazare. Rosie is naive and not very smart, with a vague goal of separating herself from her family and identity, changing her name from Rose-Marie to Rosie to signal the change. She works at a motel, and has an affair with her married boss, becoming pregnant by him. She doesn't know who is the father of her second child, having had a blackout on the night of conception (which is the same night that her boss gets married again; Rosie attends the wedding, and gets so drunk she cannot remember anything that happened). She comes to Guadaloupe in search of her brother Lazare, who is supposedly operating a sex-toy distribution with a friend. Her story is confused, meandering, and without a clear thrust, as she appears to be buffeted around by her experiences.

Lagrand, on the other hand, is a smart, handsome, well-dressed and successful man to whom Lazare has attached himself. When Lazare is away with a 'business partner' (on a trip that will result in the murder of another man), Lagrand agrees to pick up Rosie at the airport; he arrives to find her with her sickly son, Titi, and almost nine months pregnant.

It's hard to feel any kind of empathy to Rosie, and in retrospect, I wonder if it's a kind of test of the reader. I'm used to novels that assume an identification of reader with the protagonist. Having Rosie as main focus for the first part of the book made me work at trying to find any kind of connection with her, although I found her stupid, difficult, and unpredictable. Her insistence on holding her brother on a pedestal regardless of her experiences where he took financial advantage of her are baffling. And her clear dislike of her son, Titi, is upsetting. Everything about Rosie contradicts what we are supposed to believe about women, especially in contemporary writing: they will do anything for their children, they are steadfast and strong in the fact of adversity, and they are the 'good' sex.

Lagrand is a reassuring character, one who sees the lack of sense in the world around him, reflective on his own mother's insanity and how it affected him, and the most familiar character to me. He eventually falls in love with Rosie, although he is disdainful of her family--horrified by Lazare's role in murder, and disgusted by Rosie's parents, who live in Guadaloupe, having remained married but sleeping with much younger partners. (After Mr. Carpe's death, grandson Titi eventually marries his grandfather's young girlfriend). The ending fast-forwards 19 years, where Lagrand, although married to a powerful woman, takes Rosie from her home with Titi, where she is isolated and mocked by her family--who refuse her affection to the point of disallowing anyone to touch her.

The novel shifted back and forth in my expectations: I expected a more realist novel, but it became a sort of complex fable when I had finished. I found it to be unfamiliar in its characters and plot, but found it also to be quite powerful in subverting my expectations. ( )