I didn't really get this book. Perhaps it works better for people who are more familiar with Madagasy mythology, but the writing style jumped between the modern day protagonist named Ietsy , and the mythological deity he is named after, who brought life to the island. There wasn't much of a story here, the biggest hook is that our protagonist has insomnia, and that makes him think about his life up until this point. He doesn't do much to garner sympathy for himself, he just kind of bounces through his life. So, even though this book was short, it was hard to read, because the story wasn't compelling and the storytelling itself wasn't clear. Perhaps the allegories here are more evident to someone more steeping in the mythology, but I wasn't. I was just mystified. ( )

DNF after 20% in. It wasn't horrible but I didn't care about the main character. I really wanted to learn more about Madagascar but I only learned about a selfish young man. ( )

I wasn’t sure what I thought of this book. (Which is why I didn’t review it for a long time.) It seemed kinda jazzy; the display quote at the beginning was about jazz—jazz is life, etc—and I think that if you like that kinda Black, classy, romantic music, you’d like this book. It is a romantic drama. The protagonist is well-off by African standards, (I wonder how many people would want to read much about grinding African poverty), and not a terribly political/liberation-y person, like so many people generally. He is essentially the sort to want to go to Paris and have a good time, even if he finds out when he gets there that’s he’s not the most privileged person around anymore. (What’s a Malagasy? Oh, you mean a n*****.) So, he returns to the “enchanted island”; the enchanted island being, of course, not in north-west Europe, but south-east Africa. Of course, as someone has noted there’s generally not a whole lot that an Anglophone knows about Madagascar, as the most widely spoken language there is French, not English, and also it’s part of Africa, not the West, so there’s less demand for translation, and less fellow feeling. (To put it nicely.) This made the book somewhat appealing, but in a distanced way. Of course, it is, again, a very personal—more than personal, private, romantic—book; not everyone in a different culture is sitting around wondering about how their people are faring. Like the display quote implies, it all comes down to your opinion of jazz.

Suffering from insomnia, Iesty Razak passes the nights looking back over his privileged life as a member of Madagascar's hereditary elite and the derivation of his status from the island's legendary history.

The shifts in the timeline and between Iesty's life and the legendary past were not always easy to follow and I definitely felt that I could have done with more background context. ( )

The novel slips between the main character's present, his childhood and young adulthood, and Malagasi history and mythology. It's not always clear (to me at least) what parallels or meaning one is intended to draw between these parts, which sit somewhat separately above the surface, presumably joined beneath it. Which is to say, I suppose, that this is a book which requires some work of the reader, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Water, its ebb and flow, its concealing and guarding nature, and its ability to be both a barrier and a facilitator of journeying is something of a theme, particularly in the mythological sections, and which must (I again presume) have meaning in the main character's life story, named as he is, Ietsy, after the first created human.

What I took from it was that our birth culture shapes us, and that while we can rebel and turn from that, to recreate ourselves in our own imagined image, or in the image we absorb from the wider world, we will find more peace in accepting ourselves as formed from that earlier cultural matrix, that we can take responsibility for what it has given to and taken #from us and those around us with a guiltless acceptance. ( )